How Artificial Intelligence helps banks understand — and keep — their customers

A bank with a solid customer base starts from a good position. As a rule of thumb, acquiring new customers costs five times as much as retaining existing customers. But to generate revenue from existing customers as well, banks face the task of activating their customers in a value-creating way and retaining them over the long term – particularly in light of the currently high willingness of bank customers to switch providers. The solution lies in improving customer satisfaction and customer benefit, and the key to that is personalization.

With digital transformation, banks have every opportunity to plan and design their business processes consistently and end to end from the customer's perspective. Companies have been processing data for many years and now have large data treasures at their disposal. However, data only becomes valuable when it can be processed productively and when that processing also brings customers tangible added value.

But how do data points become sales-relevant insights into customer needs? And how can banks know and serve the preferences of each individual one of their thousands or even millions of customers?

The answer lies in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.

If data is the new oil, then AI is the engine

Used sensibly, AI expands the possibilities for optimizing sales and marketing processes for customer benefit. The benefit that actually reaches the customer is not only a question of the product offering itself, but also one of timing and approach. Taking the customer's situation and receptiveness into account and optimizing communication across the entire customer journey and across all touchpoints is a decisive factor for sales success. The goal is the best fit between supply and demand at any given point in time.

AI is capable of mastering this task in a data-driven way. Acceleraid's software solutions make it possible to offer an individual customer, at any point in time, exactly what they want at that moment, with exactly the right approach. Regardless of whether that wish is conscious or not. The path there leads through personalization that spans the entire sales process. Its foundation is the consolidation and analysis of data already available within the company using various machine learning algorithms.

To this end, customer data from all available sources is identified, combined and used. By integrating CRM, transaction and user data in a private cloud-based big data infrastructure, data that was previously siloed is made usable and can be applied to customer processes.

Increasing sales across all channels – from website to email and customer portal to call center

An example: Two different users open a bank's website at the same time – but the layout they find, the information that is highlighted and the way they are addressed differ and are tailored to their predicted interests; for example, one is prominently shown a loan offer, the other a securities investment.

The variant displayed is the result of automated data analysis and the resulting estimation of conversion probabilities. The AI incorporates all usable, predefined data parameters to create an individual customer experience in real time. Among other things, it can take into account which channel users access from, from which device, at what time of day, even in what weather. The result is an automated and personalized approach that satisfies individual customer needs and thus creates added value.

“When users receive only the information that is relevant to them, this demonstrably increases their satisfaction and the likelihood that they will conclude a contract online. For banks, customer satisfaction is a direct revenue driver – satisfied customers buy more, stay longer and recommend more often. For banks, AI-supported customer engagement offers sales increases of ten to 30 percent.”

Michael Altendorf, CEO Acceleraid

Activating existing customers with automated campaigns

A look at the insurance sector illustrates how effectively data-driven customer relationship management (CRM) retains customers and increases revenue.

Members of a statutory health insurer are to be informed about new private supplementary insurance. Who should be contacted, when and through which channel can be read by the AI from the existing customer data. In the next step, the automatically clustered user groups can be offered content tailored to them; for one, for example, travel insurance is of interest, for another, the voucher for the fashion shop. In addition, the software automatically identifies the optimal send time for the messages as well as the channel of contact – phone, email, SMS, etc.

The system keeps learning from the respective customer responses and continuously adapts its strategies. This way, marketing and sales in the company can be confident at all times that measures are carried out with the greatest possible effectiveness, and at the same time they receive valuable feedback about their customers' current preferences.

Personalization becomes customer retention and customer activation, and thus a direct competitive advantage.

LEAN INTEGRATION INTO EXISTING SYSTEMS

Acceleraid AI can be applied easily within existing IT infrastructures. It requires no in-depth IT knowledge and enables a quick project start.

With just a few clicks, banks can draw the right conclusions from their multitude of data silos in one place. Importing even distributed data sets works flexibly and simply: data can be sent from the respective applications to the Adtelligence server via an interface or simply as a .csv file.

What used to be manual work – assembling target groups, planning campaigns and analyzing success via cumbersome Excel exports and a wide variety of systems – is now done by the AI automatically, relieving sales and marketing teams.

DATA PROCESSING RELIABLY GDPR-COMPLIANT

Customer data is sensitive information. Users, especially in Germany, place great importance on retaining control over their personal data. The EU has taken this into account since 2018 with the General Data Protection Regulation. Because Acceleraid is headquartered in Germany and has experience in the German and European market, all Adtelligence solutions are GDPR-compliant at all times and up to date with compliance at the national and international level.