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Personalization overall helps in loyalty and engagement. As per Salesforce reports, 84% individuals want to be treated as a person, compared to phone number or email address.

Despite the necessity of driving individualised experiences, the banking industry is struggling to keep up with retailers, media and tech companies in delivering these highly tailored interactions and product offerings to their customers. They need to take care of prospects, customers, partners and also bank suppliers. Managing Data for all of them is a real challenge for the banks. And considering that millennial will comprise a significant part of future bankers banking transactions, it is important that banks appeal to them with emotion, branding and lasting connections. Plus the millennial will easily move away if the experience is not good.

Issues faced by the banks are:

Some banks may provide personal customer experiences; the vast majority cannot meet the high expectations of their customers, partners and distributor network.  The problem is that many banks position their customer journey and marketing efforts around common life moments or experiences.

For example, when a client transitions from high school to college to job, the bank will bombard that person with student-loan messaging. Later, when the consumer turns 21, the bank will send them marketing material related to purchasing their first house, a new car, insurance, or a holiday.

The following approach is definitely not personalisation.  It’s just lifecycle and lifestyle marketing. Just because the consumer turned 25, it doesn’t mean they automatically want to have a home loan or get married. By making broad assumptions about someone based on their age, consumers – especially millennia’s – will start to feel distant from their bank. The more they get communication which is non-relevant they will start moving away from the bank.  Reality is that banks are not doing the hard work of truly understanding their customers’ needs, and, as a result, their customer journeys feel too generic. Rather than marketing based on life moment segmentation, banks should instead work to target customers through contextualisation. Platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud along with Einstein AI capabilities will help understand the customer journey, customer transactions and help in personalizing the experience provided to the customer. Agencies like us we bring in strong experience in Banking space helping customer with the industry wide use-cases and experience ideas to be provided.

Personalization using Contextualisation

Financial companies should deploy a contextual journey, incorporating products seamlessly into the shopping experience. However, banks must analyse their data closely to support such a journey. Consumers want to buy at the right moment – not when the bank thinks they should buy, but when they’re ready to buy, which could potentially be anywhere in the larger customer journey. Banks must tailor financial offerings to the present needs of their customers, and predictive data can help them look forward rather than backward, allowing them to anticipate customer desires and goals more effectively.

A contextual approach recognises that the customer journey is never perfect and must be refined through data. This forward-thinking use of data allows banks to design the various touch-points of the customer journey timely and contextually, including conversations with customer service representatives or assistance applying for financial products. By providing these individualised interactions throughout the consumer journey, clients will be satisfied and engaged as they’ll feel that their bank truly cares for their unique needs.

What does the next generation want?

Banks are interested in attracting the next generation, and although they differ from their parents, they still have many similar requirements. However, one key difference is they desire a bank that can connect with them individually and solve their problems. Also they want the services to be provided online unlike visiting the bank thrice weekly as their parents used to do.  Beyond leveraging a contextual journey to reach these younger demographics, banks must take the time to define their desires, challenges and hang-ups with older methods and approaches.

Next Generation occupy a wide range of life stages, meaning they can’t be so easily thrown together into one giant pot. And whichever life stage they’re at, they want banks to support their current needs. These consumers are likewise open and willing to pay for personalised financial advice. As mentioned above, according to MoneyWise, 60% of next generation customers would consider changing banks for better digital capabilities, such as mobile apps, digital experience and transaction friendly technical support.

Similarly, this block of consumers wants to use the services of organisations that share their values. In other words, they want a sense of community. Traditionally, community and geography were tied together, but the contemporary idea is shifting toward other connections like belief systems, hobbies and passions. To target the specific needs of niche audiences within the next generation, banks should look to Fintechs. By empowering these small but exciting start-ups, big banks can service an even larger number of constituents without being too bland. Regional and local banks are also great partners, allowing one to tap into established markets.

Importance of leveraging a partner to support personalisation

Banks can deliver personalisation through a more contextual customer journey and by addressing the unique needs/challenges of the younger generations. However, banks must also manage their data scientists and portfolios efficiently. Research from McKinsey shows only 16% of data-science teams follow a standard protocol when developing AI tools, limiting the creation of individualised initiatives. Additionally, only 8% of banks can utilise predictive insights from machine learning models, which is pivotal to contextual marketing. To overcome these challenges, banks should consider leveraging a third-party digital product designer and consultant to provide value and unify disjointed teams. Products like Salesforce and Einstein Intelligence are products already built ready to use and partners like Social Beat can help Banks meet up their use-cases increasing their engagement in return leading to happy and loyal customers.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

In order to create great digital experiences, you need to first have a great team in place. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already come to the conclusion that you need a Martech team, whether it’s to build a brand new Martech solution or to maintain an existing strategy.

Marketing automation can be proved very useful for companies if used correctly and if the correct decisions are being made. You can achieve outstanding results such as consistent higher ROI and conversions. Marketing automation can help dramatically increase productivity, which in turn will help you to optimize cost.

If you are thinking of implementing marketing automation in your company, there are some factors that you need to consider in order to make it work for you, but you will need qualified candidates. The main point here is that even if everything will be automated, there are some things for which your opinion and a team of well-trained employees will be necessary.

At this time, comes the need to hire the right people to do a specific job. This will be a big investment for you and your company. Therefore, your human resource manager needs to create a clear job description and interviewing process to hire the right team members.

Based on the experience we have outlined steps to build a Martech team with key roles and challenges that will come your way in building the team. Certain steps you need to follow:

Defining the Skills and Roles your team needs:

It’s a very important step where you need to define the skill and roles you need to build for implementing an amazing Marketing Automation solution. Some of the skillset we have identified are:

• Business Development Manager: This person will be responsible for building the business, getting projects and creating a pipeline.
• Practice Head: The following person will be the central point who will manage
  • Sales with the Business Development Manager
  • Communication with the Management on the overall status of the Business
  • Work with HR team to onboard team members
  • Work with the Project Management Team to define outline strategy streamline processes
  • Closely work with Account Managers for Client Success
  • Manage conflict and stakeholders
• Project Manager: Manage the overall project timelines, schedule and cost
• Solution Consultant: Build the overall solution and also help with presales pitch
• Campaign Developer: Develop the solution and use-cases on the platforms. Help clients with campaign and reporting.
• Data Analyst: Work on various data operations as well reporting analytics
• Quality Assurance: To confirm the solution works as expected and does not have bugs.
• Account Strategist: Following person brings the Agency side of the business in the Martech solution to blend both the solutions and provide a customer offering or two sides of the solution for the customer.

Not only the roles can change but the frequency of the skills required would depend on the size of the project, engagement value as well as complexity involved.

So this leads to the question: Should you build your team in-house? Or outsource?

Building Process

Hiring the Team In-house

If your organization is large enough, there’s a good chance you have the resources to hire an entire team.

First, map out the talent you already have available to you internally, and identify the gaps in skills that need to be filled. Then, before jumping immediately into recruiting for the specific roles outlined above, consider if you might be able to hire someone that is more of a generalist. For the skills that won’t be needed often enough to keep someone busy full-time, can you find one person to wear several different hats? If so, can that person be effective enough at those different skills for your Martech solution to be successful?

After exploring your options, it’s time to move into the recruiting and hiring process. Good Salesforce talent can be hard to find, but it’s out there! A good place to start is on LinkedIn, searching for people with Salesforce capabilities that may be in or connected to your network. Networking in the community can be very helpful if you’re looking for local talent: consider meetups, or local events if the timing is right. Getting reference also will be a good source to find talent. Posting knowledge articles and promotions post on LinkedIn are a good way to connect various sources and sourcing resume for profiles.

Hire a Partner that has people with the skills

If your organization is smaller and you don’t have the resources to hire an entire team for building and maintaining your Martech, your best bet may be to work with a partner.

If you do not have resources, it might make more sense to align your Martech project with a provider like Airum or Custom Centre rather than building an entire team to implement, monitor and maintain the solution. Even if you do have a knowledgeable IT staff, it may not make sense to use them for this if they are not used to working with the technologies needed to assist with Martech.

By working with the right partner, you can rest assured that your Martech solution is in the hand of experts. When evaluating partners to work with, you’ll want to first make a list of the things that matter most to you. You probably want more than just a great end result; more than likely, you also want to become smarter from the experience and retain knowledge, as well as have confidence that you’ll be able to develop the next solution.

Identifying what you want to get out of the experience besides the one off project will help guide you in choosing the type of company you want to work with. Some companies will focus solely on turning the martech platform around quickly. Others, like Mightas, focus on improving digital capabilities and maturity—while also delivering an excellent experience to your customers. If that entices you, look for partners that provide and create value for customers.

We also encourage you to choose a partner that contributes to Ohana. This will have a great impact on the Salesforce community and, ultimately, improve the overall ecosystem.

Take the long road and learn as you go: Make Mistakes but learn from it

Building a Martech team can seem like a daunting and challenging process, but the good news is that you’re never alone. When we started building the team at Social Beat we took time to consider the phases that occur after Martech license is sold, a new solution will need to do more than just automate martech—what integrations are required, what will come next in terms of digital transformation? Thinking about value, maintenance and growing your digital maturity may influence your hiring/staffing goals.