Words matter: Don’t overlook customer messaging in your CX strategy
North American banks have a slew of opportunities to transform their customer messaging strategies by learning from their counterparts across the world. It highlights five key mindset changes: meeting customers where they are with proactive, data-driven solutions, adopting a "communications maximalist" approach, aligning messaging with brand values and recognizing the significant return on investment in improved messaging systems.
All banks should by now have discovered — some the hard way — that customer experience matters. What many financial institutions might not yet recognize is that customer messaging, a narrow subset of total customer experience, could be the most critical component of CX.
Customer messaging refers to the strategies and techniques a company uses to communicate with its customers across channels and touchpoints — ranging from email, SMS and chat; to in-app notifications and device-generated push alerts; to all types of social media. Today, banks face competition from challengers, both banks and digital newcomers, that often differentiate themselves by having a better understanding of what customers are doing in real time and using that knowledge to deliver relevant content in a consistent and useful way.
The challenge is, compared with other aspects of CX, getting customer messaging right demands not only different competencies but also a different mindset on the part of a financial institution.
Institutions in North America that want to raise their game would do well to consider the experiences of banks abroad, particularly in Latin America and Europe. Both regions, for different reasons, have much to teach North American bankers about messaging.
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