Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a friend who’s a senior leader in a prominent financial institution. Over coffee, we delved into the challenge of earning customer loyalty in today’s ever-changing market. This got me thinking that most financial institutions are facing the same challenge, given the changing market dynamics. So, what can they do about it?
Most financial institutions aspire to attract new customers, provide exceptional service, and cultivate long-term relationships that result in years of business. However, these ambitions require more than just good intentions. To achieve these goals, you need to pay close attention to the complete customer lifecycle. By consistently exceeding expectations at every stage, you can transform potential customers into satisfied clients who become your brand’s biggest fans.
Understanding the Customer Lifecycle
Mastering the customer lifecycle is crucial for any business. It encompasses the entire customer journey, from initial awareness to subscribing to your services and ultimately becoming loyal, repeat customers.
In essence, a typical customer lifecycle consists of five stages:
Reach: This is where potential customers learn about your services.
Conversion: Prospects decide to subscribe to your services.
Acquisition: Customers begin using your services.
Retention: Keeping customers satisfied and coming back for more.
Loyalty: Building a strong, long-term relationship with customers who become advocates for your brand.
It Doesn’t End with Customer Acquisition
For a long time, financial institutions mainly acted towards strengthening their performance till the first three stages, focusing on customer acquisition. However, a crucial point is often missed—your job doesn’t end here. The real business value is hidden behind customer retention and loyalty.
According to a study, it costs five to 25 times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. To ensure sustainable business growth and future-proof, you must focus on growing your customer base and getting repeat business by making customers stick for a long time.
By focusing on the end-to-end customer lifecycle, from reach to retention and loyalty—you can build solid and long-term relationships with your customers and make them the biggest advocate of your business.
This approach will translate into a stronger customer base, more business, and greater brand value.
Why Revamp Customer Lifecycle Management?
Transforming the end-to-end customer lifecycle is a must if you’re looking to make your customers stick, but this cannot be made possible without taking a fresh look at your customer lifecycle management process.
Here is why revamping customer lifecycle management should be your top priority:
Better Digital Onboarding
Customer onboarding is a make-or-break step for financial institutions and is increasingly shifting to digital channels. However, a study suggests that 63% of customers abandoned their banks during the digital onboarding process before completion.
Customer onboarding is a complex process that can be costly without adequate automation. You must ensure a smooth digital onboarding process that reduces the onboarding time while addressing challenges like lack of transparency, siloed operations, and compliance.
Superior Customer Experience
As a financial institution, you’re under a lot of pressure to improve the way your customers experience your services. The best time to make this happen is now. It’s a smart move to move away from handling lots of different and disconnected manual tasks. Instead, you should embrace a unified and automated approach that covers the entire process from start to finish. This change will help you provide a much better overall experience for your customers.
Efficient Processes
A disconnected manual system not only causes low customer satisfaction but also leads to delayed revenue generation, high costs, communication silos, and poor agility. These inefficiencies can result in a significant impact on customer experience.
Data-Driven Decision Making
In today’s data-rich environment, the ability to harness customer data is invaluable. Revamping Customer Lifecycle Management allows you to collect, analyze, and leverage customer data effectively. With data-driven insights, you can make informed decisions, tailor your services to individual customer needs, and proactively address issues, ultimately leading to a better customer experience and higher customer retention rates.
Regulatory Compliance and Security
Financial institutions are under constant scrutiny when it comes to regulations and data security. A robust Customer Lifecycle Management system ensures that you are compliant with industry standards and regulatory requirements. It provides the necessary tools to safeguard customer information, prevent fraud, and maintain the trust of your customers, all while streamlining processes to reduce compliance-related costs and risks.
In Conclusion
Customer Lifecycle Management is a crucial aspect of your business strategy. It involves guiding your customers through every step of their journey with your company, from their initial awareness of your brand to becoming loyal advocates. All these points present a strong case for you to consider transforming your customer lifecycle management.
I will be writing another blog that will talk about how financial institutions like yours can streamline customer lifecycle management and turn customers into your biggest fans. Meanwhile, I will share this piece of information with my friend as well.
