Banks provide essential services to their customers. Money management exists beneath some of the most important aspects of living in society—paychecks, savings accounts, bill payments, housing funds, loans, etc.
The good news for consumers is that there are a variety of places they can go to fulfill these needs. This ensures that banking services are there for those who need it. This also creates competition between providers of financial services for the business of these individuals.
How does one bank set itself apart from the rest? By providing an excellent customer experience.
2020 forced just about every industry to adjust their services in some fashion. The pandemic forced many to seek digital means of interacting with companies. This trend has sped along the need for companies to make a digital transformation to address these evolving needs.
The financial industry is no different. People still need to work with their finances, even if the way in which they do it has changed. Banks are using every means available to them to fulfill changing customer demands.
And one of the important tools that is often overlooked—or misunderstood—is metadata.
Salesforce metadata provides the framework for presenting information and functionality that can create a unique and specialized experience for banking customers.
Customer experience (CX) plays a huge role in where people choose to do business. The financial industry is no different.
Here are 6 essential considerations banks should keep in mind to use metadata and improve customer experience:
Automated Reporting
Reliable and updated sets of information provide insights to every aspect of the financial industry. This could relate to how people are using your platform, what they are looking for in financial services, who is commonly using these services, and so on.
Metadata describes data points, and these descriptions can be used as a roadmap toward better understanding current—and maybe even future—customer habits.
Tags can be assigned and attached to value definitions within metadata to track performance of various aspects of your platform. Granular information such as this provides intricate and useful data on customer habits.
These insights can be compiled over time.
Actionable insights show banks what areas of service have been successful with whom, and which areas need to be updated.
Wasted or unsuccessful areas of your banking platform aren’t accomplishing anything besides distracting your customers from the more useful and essential areas. Forcing users to dig through a pile of services and areas of your platform to get to the sections they need will degrade the overall customer experience.
Data Enrichment
Metadata can also be used to bolster the existing data in your system. This process is called Data Enrichment.
The data currently being collected in your system is being arranged according to an existing set of definitions and dimensions. Metadata allows you to change these dimensions to better fit your goals and unique qualities of your bank.
Is there a section of your data that would be made more granular or helpful with the addition of an extra dimension? Metadata allows you to shape your data sets to best address your needs.
Excel pivot tables are a popular way to summarize an extensive set of data. Adding metadata tags groups specific items together to give you a unified source of performance metrics.
Metadata attributes can also be used to create additional reports in your analytics strategy.
Segmenting your data increases the specificity available to your bank. Detailed data provides the best actionable insights for your bank to improve customer experience.
Areas of Improvement
Customer experience is an ever-evolving effort. Habits change. Trends develop. Technology progresses. Working toward providing perfect CX is a task with no true point of completion.
Banks need to provide constant attention to how they can improve on their platform. What do customers want? How can you offer it to them before they even realize they want it?
Here are a few areas to focus on that can be help by metadata:
Next Best Action
Banking customers don’t always know what the next step should be in their financial considerations. A well-timed suggestion or call-to-action can guide them in the right direction. These types of insights can be gained through analyzing metadata insights and help banks win new accounts while also providing real benefits to customers.
Process Digitization
Online banking has grown in popularity over the last decade, but has really increased in necessity over the last year. Proper flows of information between users on the front end and processes on the back end are essential to creating a smooth experience.
Omnichannel
Continuity of service across a variety of channels is essential to solidifying a customer-friendly platform. Consistent functions between your various channels can be directed by metadata and make your customer interactions more intuitive.
Analyzing Metadata Insights
The insights that can be gained through proper application of metadata is integral to creating a favorable customer experience.
Learning which areas of your platform are successful will help tailor content and offerings to specific audiences.
Direct feedback will always be the best view into how your customers feel about your services, but strategic analysis of thorough data sets can often be just as useful.
Find out what works and lean into it.
Metadata can be used to organize data into easily digestible forms that can be distributed and interpreted to gain insights into the behaviors and preferences of your customers.
Customized Functionality
The processes that your customers utilize throughout their interactions with your bank are just as important as the transactions themselves. Proper customer experience relates to how they feel about working within your system as much as relates to the end result.
Metadata can be assigned to various forms and functions to customize the functionality of your Salesforce platform.
These functions should be aimed at making the tasks required of your customers to fulfill their needs as easy as possible.
Customized functions can be backed up, replicated, and applied to various areas on your platform to reduce the learning curve for your users.
Metadata Considerations
Utilizing metadata can provide a variety of benefits, but there are a couple areas that require special attention.
The way in which you use and store metadata will not only affect its value, it can also affect your legal standing.
Data Governance
Your insights are only going to be as good as the data from which they are derived. Data governance is a combination of principles and practices that are aimed at maintaining a quality pool of data.
Marketing insights, improved efficiency, and assistance with compliance are just a few of the benefits you can expect from a proper data governance plan.
Compliance
The financial industry is subject to government regulations (which will vary depending on your location and with whom you do business). The way you use and store data are typical points of consideration for these regulations.
Be aware of your applicable regulations and pay attention to how your metadata is collected, stored, and protected.