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Using Mobile Technology to Engage Customers

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Help your organization understand mobile user expectations and how they need to respond to rapid market changes. Originally published on American Banker.using Mobile technology to engage customers

Planning and executing a successful mobile roadmap is challenging under normal circumstances. This task becomes more challenging when the mobile app must comply with industry regulations and strict internal security policies. Now, add a conservative management team that errs on the side of caution along with an Information Technology (IT) department that appears to be booked solid for the next three years. Almost every Innovation Strategist or Onboarding Executive faces these issues. To make matters worse, mobile banking customers don’t know about all of this, nor do they care. They expect a seamless and delightful mobile experience that works magically.

Delighting the customer is the key to effecting organizational change, and everyone in the organization needs to understand and support this goal. So how do you make this happen? One way is to tell the story of the customer journey, starting with customer acquisition.

Removing the Roadblocks

Customers expect a delightful new account opening experience via the mobile channel. What’s more magical and frictionless than snapping a picture of a driver’s license to kick off the process, followed by snapping a picture of a check to fund the account? Snap, snap, done. Every extra step adds friction and increases the chance of customer abandonment. The customer is giving you their money, so don’t let roadblocks interfere with this experience. The risk of fraud is extremely low in a new account opening case, so treat it as such. Remember that some customers may not want to download an app, so new account opening must also be supported via the mobile browser. And, if you don’t support new account opening via the mobile channel, good luck getting that customer to drive to your branch. More wealth equals less time. Your new account opening solution needs to take less time than it takes your customer to walk to their car and back it out of their driveway. This is where the bar is set.

Engaging Customers via Mobile

Acquiring a new customer is half the battle. Keeping the customer and keeping them delighted is the other half. When mobile customers are unhappy, they leave unfavorable feedback in the app store. Just a few short years ago, if a customer had a bad experience they would tell 10 people. Today, if a customer has a bad experience they’ll give your app a one-star rating and will write an unfavorable review. How many people will see that? More than 10? Probably more like 100. You can quickly gauge how your app is doing by looking at this feedback, and also see how the competition is doing as well. If you haven’t looked at feedback, take some time to do it now. If your iOS app doesn’t support Touch ID, you will know right away by all the one-star reviews.

This may sound unreasonable, but some customers expect touch ID to be supported out of the gate. If you don’t support Touch ID, you’ll get a bad review; if you support it, you will delight your customers. Mobile check deposit is another problem area if it isn’t working correctly. A teller at a physical branch rarely rejects a check that is handed to them, so the mobile app shouldn’t either. This is another pain point for most banking apps.

Getting customers to move your app to their home screen and engage with it is critical, especially within the first 30 days of downloading it. If they don’t engage with your app three or four times within the first week, they will quickly forget about it and possibly delete it. So, how do you make the app engaging and sticky? Again, the answer is to delight customers by making magic. Snapping a picture of a bill to pay it is magical and fun. It also solves a number of problems: lost check book, can’t find a stamp and forgot to put the payment in the mailbox.  Another way to add stickiness is to prompt the users to easily turn on notifications for credits such as automatic deposits and debits such as automatic payments or when checks have cleared. Most banks hide these settings or they don’t offer them at all.

You can also add gamification. This doesn’t mean adding a knockoff version of Angry Birds to your app, but it could mean showing the user how their savings, vacation fund or college fund is growing. A simple alert that says, “You’re Hawaii fund is now at 70%. Good job!” is both informative and delightful. You could even prompt customers to make an extra deposit to attain the goal faster.

Know Your Customer

You now have a delightful app that provides a magical experience, so you’re done, right? Why stop there? Customer delight should apply to all channels of engagement. In fact, Know Your Customer (KYC) shouldn’t be a compliance issue, it should be a mantra. Google reminds users if their flight is delayed. This is helpful, magical and delightful. If a customer applies for a home or car loan by going into the branch, they should be able receive status updates through any and every channel they prefer, such as app notifications, email and even text. Customer communication is critical. If a money hawk has $700,000 in an investment account, but only has a few thousand in their checking account, the bank systems should know this. Why risk upsetting this customer by charging a $10 fee when their checking dips below a threshold? Or having the teller charge them for sorting a bag of change? If the customer knows how important they are to the bank, but the bank doesn’t know the customer, there is a huge problem.

Delighting customers and acquiring new customers should be the top priority at every level of the organization. Know your customers, delight them, and make their mobile experience as sticky and as magical as possible. This is a race and your competition is running at full speed. If you can’t onboard mobile customers in a couple of clicks, if you are seeing many one-star app ratings, and if your backend systems don’t talk and you don’t know your customer, you need to pick up the pace.

Learn more how mobile transforms customer engagement.

 

 

The post Using Mobile Technology to Engage Customers appeared first on Kofax Advisor.

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