Using Data to Acquire, Engage and Retain Banking Customers

Jim Marous:
Hello and welcome to Banking Transformed. I'm your host, Jim Marous, founder and CEO of the Digital Banking Report and co-publisher of The Financial Brand. More than ever, delivering banking experiences rooted in personalized engagement is an expectation from every consumer. More than just a requirement for communication, financial institutions must develop personalized, tailored products for the customer segment that they're going after. Consumers are increasingly diversified in their financial relationships. If you don't know your customer, understand their needs, and deliver value with each engagement, trust and loyalty will be damaged.

Jim Marous:
I'm excited to have Joe Welu, founder and CEO of Total Expert on the show today. Joe shares how banks and credit unions are differentiating their organizations by knowing what customers want before they do so. Welcome to the show today, Joe. Customers more than ever are annoyed, receiving irrelevant offers and communications about products that they don't really care about. At the same time, customers value offers that are relevant in their context and help them with their own personal needs. In fact, a survey conducted by Salesforce found that two-thirds of customers said that they expect customers to understand their unique needs and expectations. Joe, when we talk about customer relationships with financial institutions today, compared to what it may have been 10 years ago, what's changed?

Joe Welu:
Well, I think certainly the customer's expectation has changed faster than the organizations have been able to evolve and iterate on how they approach, right, customer experience and customer engagement, so we're in a world today which was now accelerated by COVID, of course, that the expectation that the brands I work with understand my needs and are going to communicate with me in a way that is always relevant, has empathy, that expectation has become front and center, and certainly, we can talk about some of the gaps there, but progress has not kept pace, certainly.

Jim Marous:
It's interesting. We talk about the rising of expectations and I think banking, for whatever reason, got a pass forever, that organizations or people said, "It's my bank. I can expect this not to be as perfect as I want to be." But all of a sudden, the realization came that financial institutions hold more data than any other organization, and when customers are starting to get the levels of engagement with Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and other organizations that is truly unique and personalized, contextual, time-sensitive, they start to say, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why am I not getting this from my bank?"

Joe Welu:
Right? Mind-blowing.

Jim Marous:
From your perspective, what is the biggest barrier to creating this level of hyper-personalization in banking?

Joe Welu:
Well, I would start with saying there's a lot of barriers, certainly silos, legacy systems. I would say in a lot of cases, the barriers are a lack of a lack of leadership teams willing to make the small, incremental chunks of progress that can actually lead to meaningful change. They get overwhelmed by the fact that it just seems impossible to do it. If you think about really what lies inside of most banks and financial institutions, they actually have a pretty comprehensive profile of the financial life of a customer, right? If they have different accounts, there's certain data integrations that you can now utilize to even expand that financial profile, so you have a financial profile within the walls, or easily within the walls of the institution, then why aren't you able to use it?

Joe Welu:
One of the other gaps, Jim, we've talked about this one before, is even when they have the data, they have the analytics, they have the customers down in the cohorts, they even have some predictive intent things, how do you operationalize that, and then get that information into the hands of the people that are taking care of that customer, the people that are in charge of setting up messaging and communication, right? Usually, the biggest gap we see is the gap between the insights, which what can I all learn about this profile? Your Netflix example was great. "Hey, I watch these types of shows. I watch at this time of night. Here are my preferences," right? You have a lot of those insights available, but then how do you activate? How do you take action on those insights? That's the biggest gap we see in the organizations that we partner and work with.

Jim Marous:
It's interesting. You opened up so many Pandora's boxes here. The first one you said is organizations have data in different silos, it's not as clean, but isn't this somewhere where a partner, a search party solution provider really can what I'm going to call "dirty," and I don't mean dirty data as in bad data, but data that's not constructed well and easy to work with. Isn't that where third-party providers such as your company can take this data and actually make it work in not just a fundamental foundational way, but even on a more sophisticated way?

Joe Welu:
Yeah, absolutely. There's layers of sophistication that you can get into. Oftentimes, what we see is look, there's tremendous progress that can be made by doing some fairly simple things, right? If you think about even doing, let's say, hey, I've got legacy core systems, I've got siloed lines of business that have other systems that are doing, loan systems and whatnot, you can actually make a huge amount of progress simply by bringing in flat files into a centralized place, and then bringing that data together and actually expanding on the profile of every customer.

Joe Welu:
Just doing that then gives you the ability to say, "Okay, I can now better understand what's going on with each customer, their balances, what their history is as a company. Do they have a certain type of loan or not?" Then I can start driving communication that's going to be more relevant, that's going to have empathy, right? That's a pretty, I would say, low effort in the terms of big transformation projects. There is a low effort, low lift, high impact that you can get by simply doing that. Many organizations assume that it's so painful to get progress that they end up getting paralyzed and don't really just move the ball forward.

Jim Marous:
It's interesting. You mentioned leadership. Boy, Leah can certainly attest to this. There's probably not a podcast that we do that's somewhere the whole focus on leadership's challenge to get over that hurdle of doing something different, or using data differently, or looking at consumers differently, and it's such a challenge, but when you look at what you just said there, the deployment of data, the deployment of insights, the ability to say, "Yeah, we may not be in the best position to build a partnership with a third-party provider today," and the reality is timing is everything. If I was a financial institution, I could work with you today and say, "You know what? I want to go forward. It may not be perfect. I want to go forward." You could bring them early wins to the equation that could help justify future investments in some of the foundational things we're talking about, can't they?

Joe Welu:
Yeah, our approach is always, where can we get a win in 60 to 90 days? That win sometimes can be, hey, we're going to increase engagement with a cohort of customers. We're going to improve a certain part of the customer journey, right? If you think about organizations don't always think about, "I need to deliver a customer journey that sets this up for a lifelong relationship," right? I approach every customer as though I want to keep this customer forever, right? Organizationally, if you have that mentality, that needs to permeate down into everything that you do.

Joe Welu:
If you all agree we want to have a perfect customer journey that can facilitate a lifelong relationship as the trusted financial partner, let's all agree on that, if you're in the organization, of course, and then say, okay, let's start attacking it. Let's look at the customer journey I have and where we're failing. We're failing to follow up with these types of customers once they onboard, we're failing to educate them with the other types of products and services that we have, right? We're failing to make recommendations based on data that we have. There's layers of things that varying complexity to get out the door and make improvements on.

Joe Welu:
But what we found is progress leads to more momentum. And when you make progress, that feeds momentum, and then you make more progress, and then all of the sudden, you look back over a six-to-nine month time period, and you've made a meaningful impact in the quality of your customer journey, which translates into, "Hey, I've got customers having better experiences with our organization," and those experiences generally are going to lead to better outcomes and deeper relationships.

Jim Marous:
Using data to drive acquisition or cross-selling is not new. Heck, I was talking to you before the podcast that I did some form of this 30 and 40 years ago, a long time ago, but really, was more built around the product that we wanted to sell a product, and we targeted who we wanted to sell it to. What do organizations today do wrong when they're looking at targeting prospects and trying to do cross-selling across the entire customer journey?

Joe Welu:
Yeah, so first of all, I really dislike the word "cross-sell" or the phrase "cross-sell." I went back and forth with my team on it. I think "cross-sell" is the wrong... Cross-sell tends to be a product-first mentality. It just kind of breeds that mindset of, "I'm going to pitch a product, have a product-first mindset." I believe, we believe, you and I always talk about this and believe, that you need to have a human-first, a customer-first mindset. What is best for this customer? Then what do we have that can help them achieve that next financial milestone, more financial health and wellness, right? Maybe it's a better credit card, a better loan, a better interest rate, whatever it might be, but think from a human first. If you think human first and you think about solving problems and helping customers make better financial decisions and then you're making recommendations based on that, yes, that's cross-sell, but it's a different methodology. Does that make sense? I just think you have to delineate that.

Jim Marous:
I think you're right on target there that really what we're talking about here, if I'm not mistaken, is instead of cross-sell, we're recommending services based on instant timing of when it's most appropriate.

Joe Welu:
Based on a deeper understanding of the financial circumstances and financial profile of that individual customer.

Jim Marous:
We used to push auto loans in the fall, home equity in the spring. The reality is home equity happens all year long and you're going to get more effective if you time it.

Joe Welu:
Yeah, totally, totally. It's amazing. There are treasure troves of data that most organizations have that if they start learning how to action on it, meaning get it into workflows, automate, follow-up, automate recommendations based on what the data is telling you, you can make progress on all of those things before you even get into really fancy AI and propensity modeling, right?

Jim Marous:
Right.

Joe Welu:
There's tremendous progress. I think some of the mistakes that we have witnessed over the years in some pretty decent-sized organizations is they get really enamored with propensity modeling and data modeling when they actually haven't even gotten the basic foundational blocking and tackling of being able to really take action on the insights they already have, right, so it's like if you can't take action and deliver into the workflow of the business, meaning enable customer-facing teams to have the right type of conversation, if you can't do that with the data you have, more modeling and AI models is not going to actually deliver more outcomes or more progress to the organization, you're just going to spend more on data and modeling.

Jim Marous:
How are some of your most successful clients, the banks, and say, the credit unions that you're using partnering with, leveraging data and insights to impact their business?

Joe Welu:
Yeah, all kinds of things, Jim. I would tell you that some of the most impactful ones are we're bringing in insights from things like how much equity is in a home, or when is somebody shopping for a loan, or how long has a loan been in effect, right, so if they know there's seven, eight years that they've been in a mortgage. There's all kinds of data points around and it tends to skew heavily on the lending products today. But we're starting to see also people doing things on the other types of products and services, right? If they have large balances in an account that are being unused and they have a wealth team internally, they're leveraging that to then make recommendations and referrals over to, "Hey, by the way, we can be helpful here. Have you thought about this?"

Joe Welu:
We're also seeing people putting in a lot of... It's all being done with data, the insights, and then action, so they're putting workflows together with those things. I have my customer data. I'm going to be able to surface insight, which sometimes is, hey, they're going to be in the market shopping for a loan. We know this because of these three data points, okay, and when one of those data triggers and changes, we know that somebody should reach out to them. We should also be communicating them with a education-centric message that lets them know the types of things available, how we can be helpful. Those things should be firing and happening, driven by automation. The customer customers we have that are winning with that have this data insights action framework and they're just applying it to different scenarios. Does that make sense?

Jim Marous:
Yeah, it totally does. I have so many personal examples. I've been thinking about them probably more lately than a long time because I usually give the example of the fact when I bought my Jeep three years ago that I was amazed that I put all these triggers out there, things that people could use to say, "He's buying something," and the only people that contacted me were the dealers and manufacturers. Well, guess what? It's three years. My lease is coming up and the only organization that reached out to me is Allied because they have the lease. This is not hard to find. In the same sense-

Joe Welu:
Unbelievable, right?

Jim Marous:
... In the same sense, we have people like myself that regularly have deposits that go over to Acorns and Robinhood and some other places that all the financial institution had to look at was the transactions to say, "Jim has a pattern here. Let's become part of that trend."

Joe Welu:
Totally, totally. I mean, it's a great example of your primary financial institution can have access to the fact that you actually have a lease and it's been out for three years and they should be able to take that signal, that data point, and you should be getting information from them about, "Hey, you're a fantastic customer. Here are some options for you," and they can generally even sort of mostly qualify you based on data that's already there. These things are actually not hard to ex to execute on, it's just getting them prioritized. I think a big one right now, Jim, that we're seeing our customers doing, and it makes a lot of sense, there's unprecedented amounts of equity in homes out there right now, right? A lot of banks that offer equity lines are saying, "Hey, we can offer you a way to tap into some of that equity, right, to remodel, do whatever you want, save for college, whatever it is." They're putting together education-type content and information around debt and equity and how to be able to leverage equity in a smart way.

Jim Marous:
We've talked about this once before that we believe, I think both you and I believe there's a difference between a great customer experience and building stronger customer engagement. Can you define from your perspective what the difference is between the two?

Joe Welu:
I think there's a vast difference, and I think it all depends on how you look at it, but customer experience is the sum total of kind of how the customer basically feels about each individual interaction. Okay, so if they go onto the website and they open an account, that leads into customer experience. If somebody's rude on a phone call or service call, that certainly leads into it. But high-quality customer engagement actually does a tremendous amount to deepen the relationship, so if I'm engaging with a customer with education-centric information, engaging with them from a perspective of empathy, meaning I understand, I have context around what financial milestones most likely are in that point in life, that can goes deeper than just customer experience. It really goes to the heart of relationship-building. I think of it like this, Jim, the quality of every relationship, business, personal, customer, is based on the quality of the communication and engagement that you have, right?

Jim Marous:
Yeah.

Joe Welu:
The experience layer is certainly important.

Jim Marous:
Yeah, it's interesting, too, because this builds trust and loyalty. If you engage with me based on my personal situation and take an empathetic look at how can you help me as opposed to, as we said, cross-selling for the sake of cross-selling.

Joe Welu:
Yes. Human-first.

Jim Marous:
That builds trust and loyalty.

Joe Welu:
Absolutely. If you think about how I always say the amount of opportunity is the nicest way to say it that still exists in modern banking and lending, the opportunity that exists to build true customer loyalty is relatively untapped, right? There's not an organization out there that I think has completely and utterly figured it out how to build ridiculous customer loyalty the way some of the consumer brands have been. I think that opportunity is still there. I really do. I think people can have different levels of success at it, but they do have to think human-first, empathy-first instead of product-first, and that should drive how their individual customer journeys are handled.

Jim Marous:
And oh, by the way, we'll get better results if we do that. It's not a revenue versus non-revenue, it can be higher revenue if you do that.

Joe Welu:
The revenue follows, right?

Jim Marous:
Yeah.

Joe Welu:
It doesn't lead, but it will follow, right? If you lead with empathy and you lead with better engagement with your customers, the financial outcomes will happen.

Jim Marous:
You mentioned it earlier about not just keeping the data within the marketing department for a communication cycle, but to share it across the organization. How important is it to share that across the organization, not just for sales and engagement purposes, but for innovation and product development purposes? How are you seeing data sharing really improve the overall status of an organization?

Joe Welu:
Yeah, I'll give you some examples, actually. We have had a major data project going at Total Expert for the last about 12 to 14 months now to make sure. We have some pretty sophisticated customers that really want to understand we have a lot of data because we do communication engagement across the entire customer journey. Then we have transaction data in many cases as well, so these organizations are wanting that full picture of that data, and actually, to your point, product teams are saying, "We want to develop products and services. We're thinking about a different type of loan or a different type of product and we'd really like to understand the different customer journeys that we have and how the behavior is and what we can learn from that," and so we've actually had a project to where we're giving access to really robust datasets to our customers about their customer journeys, right, things that you wouldn't normally relevant be relevant for sales and marketing use cases, but are relevant if you're thinking about building new products and launching new products.

Joe Welu:
Companies are thinking this way, brands are thinking this way, and I think vendors and tech partners like Total Expert, it's up to us to be really eight partners on providing an easy way for them to build intelligence internally using the data sets that we have and augment their ability to build intelligence about, what should they be building product-wise? What are the things customers are responding to?

Jim Marous:
It's interesting. We talk about the third-party providers and it's in the best interest of the third-party providers to number one, as you mentioned earlier, make sure we get the easy hits out of the way that we get the low-hanging fruit that we see success early, because normally, that makes it so a financial institution will want to invest more or with Total Expert or whoever their partner is in doing this well. What's also interesting is you just brought it up is the amount of intelligence that your organization can create over time, working with many different size and types of financial institutions makes it so that you can say, "Hey, you know what? If we provided our clients this insight, they're going to be able to even do more of what we get a handle on over time." This is, I think, sometimes way overlooked by organizations that want to build their own process. They want to build their own cross-sell program, they want to build their own marketing program, that the third-party providers really provide so much depth of knowledge because of how many customers you actually work with, right?

Joe Welu:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have tens of millions of customer journeys that are deployed all the time, right, and we have engagement preferences. We have all kinds of anonymized data, of course, that we're looking at when we're looking at what is the ideal amount of touchpoints for a 25-year-old customer that just open an account, right? What is that, right? We have that type of data. What are the right amounts of communication and engagement to make sure if somebody applies and shows interest in applying that you actually fulfill that and they actually become a customer? We call that lead or application to "funded to customer."

Joe Welu:
We have millions and millions of data points on it and a team of engineers that are fiercely committed to saying it's really about empowering our customers to deliver the best possible customer journey. Really, we call it, "We want to empower our customers to deliver the perfect customer journey for the life of their customer." That is our passion. Fo for us to do that, we got to get really good, and are getting really good, we made a lot of progress over this last couple, but get really, really good at being able to handle mass volumes of data and then deliver the orchestration of a customer journey across all kinds of different touchpoints.

Jim Marous:
Talking about communicating across touchpoints and all that, how important is speed or real-time engagement to the overall six success of a program? Have you looked at how important it is to get that immediate impact out there as opposed to waiting a month or a quarter for opportunities to be delivered to the consumer?

Joe Welu:
Well, I think real-time or near real-time, right? I mean, as my engineering team tells me, right, when they think of real-time and I say "real-time" to them, that means like a hundredth of a second, right?

Jim Marous:
Right.

Joe Welu:
When you and I talk about real-time, we're like, "Okay, if you have an insight, let's make sure we're communicating that same day," so there's different ways of looking at real-time, but as nearly real-time as possible is super important. If you think about it, we live in a very fast-paced, very evolving world all the time, right? If you think about consumers, their financial situations are very fluid, different things coming up in their life, come and go, right? Financial circumstances change. You need to be able to react very quickly to those insights around that customer so that you can best serve them, right?

Joe Welu:
If I want to have empathy, what does that mean? I want to really understand what's going on with my customer from their perspective and I want to deeply understand all the time so that I can be a great partner, and so real-time, I believe, is really important If you get an insight on, as an example, your situation that you're going to be looking for a new car three months from now might not be an appropriate time. We should be giving you information and educate and how we can help you right now.

Jim Marous:
Right. Getting away from sales and getting away from product innovation, the use of data for these things that you help your customers with, how can banks leverage data and insights and how are you using data insights to help educate customers on things like financial wellness and financial literacy?

Joe Welu:
Yeah, that's a great point. I was just working on a piece this morning for Financial Literacy Month, right? April is, to my knowledge, Financial Literacy Month, and so first of all, we think of, I've got a slide that I have, and it's essentially marketing's got a line through it, okay? Marketing is dead if you think about in relation to banking and lending financial services. What I mean by that is education and knowledge about financial health, building wealth, the difference between debt and equity, what homeowner can mean versus renting, sharing knowledge and educating consumers about those various topics is the most powerful thing you can do as somebody that's trying to earn their trust and earn the right to do business with them. I want to segment my customers by cohort, right? I don't want to educate somebody that is 55 and has $10 million in assets on first-time homeownership. That would be irritating, right? I want to use the data I have about the customer and then I want to deliver the right type of education-centric content and communication so that I'm adding value to that customer.

Joe Welu:
What we see, particularly with newer consumers, millennials, Gen Z, Gen X, they really, really value knowledge and information. They really want to educate themselves, right? They want calculators on savings and they want calculators on debt or ownership, homeownership versus rent and what that looks like. They want those types of things, and so our customers are deploying campaigns, journeys, and things like that with communication and engagement that is education-centered, education-focused. We call this methodology educate, engage, and advise, right? Your main form of marketing should be from a position of educating and sharing information and then engaging with customers based on if they ask questions, when the right moment of communication is, right, and then helping make recommendations to them at the right moment in time.

Jim Marous:
Finally, where does a company start? When you're looking at building that relationship building that data and insight loop and going to customers and building a better relationship, where should they start? Secondly, can any size organization implement the strategy that you've discussed today?

Joe Welu:
Any size organization can make massive improvements on their current state, from a $500 million institution to a $100 billion institution. We see projects and really meaningful progress that, and when I say "progress" I mean actual ROI business impact, right? You're seeing that turn out into additional customer revenue. The best place to start, if it's with us, or another partner, or you do it internally, map out your customer journey for your different cohorts of customers, right? First, segment your customers if I've got my commercial customers, my small business customers, depending on how your lines of business are set up. Then you want to look at which lines of business cross, meaning I've got my small business, commercial customers, also our personal customers in the bank, right, so I want to understand that. Then I want to look at the various customer journeys from maybe the first time they're referred or hear about us or inquire to lifetime relationship and where all of the gaps are.

Joe Welu:
Sometimes the best way to start is to keep it even more simple than that, Jim, we have an exercise that it takes about an hour to where you just go through some of the basic touchpoints. As an example, it would be, okay, after somebody opens an account, are you automatically communicating something that's education-centric, something that's valuable to them? Are you automatically doing that over the next 30, 90, 120, 180 days, right? Yes or no, right? Then do you have, if it's a higher-value customer, do you have a personal touch that's happening? Do you have somebody that's making a personal phone call, a text message, making them understand that there's a partner there for them, right, personal banker, however you are set up? Those are the things.

Joe Welu:
You can ask a series of eight to 10 questions that will either make obvious some of the easy, low-hanging fruit type gaps that you have, or then you realize, "Oh, we got all these things done. Okay, what's the next level?" Then you just look at that entire customer journey. It really is about first touch to lifetime customer and all of the things that happened there and then just filling in those gaps

Jim Marous:
That's great. Joe, how do organizations get a hold of you and your team at Total Expert?

Joe Welu:
Yeah, absolutely. My email address, I always give out my email address, [email protected]. Feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to always just talk high-level strategy, advice, and talk about the industry. But also, totalexpert.com, our website, can reach out to our team. We'd love to have a conversation, get to understand what you're working on, what your problems are, and more than anything, what your aspirations are, what your ideas are about what kind of organization you want to be. We love having those conversations.

Jim Marous:
Hey, Joe, always great to have a conversation with you. You and your team, you guys are doing great out there. You're near dear to my heart as far as things that you're focused on because this stuff, this is basic, I mean, it's basic, but the hardest stuff to do well. The bars is rising every day and we've got to do better.

Joe Welu:
Thanks, buddy. It's always fantastic. Love the work you guys do, by the way. You guys are amazing.

Jim Marous:
Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to Banking Transformed, just rated as the Top Banking Podcast and the winner of three international awards for podcast excellence. If you enjoyed today's interview, please give our show a five-star rating on your podcast platform. Also, be sure to catch my recent articles on The Financial Brand and check out the research they're doing for The Digital Bank report. This has been a production of Evergreen Podcasts. A special thank you to our producer, Leah Longbrake, audio engineer, Sean Rule-Hoffman, and video producer, Will Pritts. I'm your host, Jim Marous