Speaking of the customer journey, banking isn’t the first thing that may come to your mind. Financial organizations always used to focus on numbers and actual offers rather than personalized communications. The times have changed.

Since the financial services market rapidly scales and becomes more competitive, the way banks treat their customers matters. 69% of people about to leave their bank complain about poor customer experience, not products and services. Thus, each time banking institutions neglect the importance of a well-orchestrated customer journey, they lose leads.

How can you prevent this? – Mind customer touchpoints in banking.

These are the various interactions that happen after a customer hears about your bank for the first time, like a viewed add on social media, blog article, transaction, bank visit, or anything else. If you connect these touchpoints into a customer journey, the banking customer experience will considerably improve.

To learn more about what banking touchpoints are and how to integrate customer communications, read our article about:

• What are the banking touchpoints?
• Customer journey: banking touchpoints to include in your communication strategy
• Importance of address verification and timely communication delivery across customer touchpoints in banking
• Inkit’s Reach Enablement Platform for connecting customer touchpoints in banking

What Are the Banking Touchpoints?

Banking touchpoints are the ways customers interact with financial institutions either in person, through a mobile application, website, or in any online and offline form. The key difference between customer touchpoints in banking and other fields is that banking communications are highly private and formal. That’s why to provide a positive customer experience, they must be well-planned and delivered securely, preferably with automated services.

To know what customer journey banking touchpoints are relevant in your case, you need to understand how people interact with your organization. This should help to map the realistic customer path and always stay in touch at the right moment.

Customer Journey: Banking Touchpoints to Include in Your Communication Strategy

With customer journey mapping, you need to remember that each customer path is unique. Thus, if one person learns about your organization from a banner ad, this doesn’t mean that all other leads will start from the same point.

Get ready to interact with customers across all the offline and digital channels involved. Here’re the most common customer touchpoints in banking:

• Social media. Even though social media isn’t suitable for official communications, it’s a great way to build your business image and support customer relationships. Some top US banks like Citibank have over 1 million subscribers on Facebook and use this social platform to engage with customers. This makes social media one of the critical customer touchpoints in banking relevant at each customer conversion funnel stage, from awareness to purchase.
• Online advertising. If banks and credit unions decide to promote their services through digital ads, they should make them targeted. It’s necessary to study customer behavior and demographics, as well as complete some data analytics. Based on these findings, you will configure ads and make them more likely to reach the target.
• Websites. When newcomers want to learn more about your financial services, they come to your website. This makes web resources a crucial customer journey banking touchpoint for building awareness.

• Online banking systems. Web and mobile banking solutions enable customers to use your services on the go and receive online support through chats any time they need it. All market leaders offer custom mobile apps and compete to make them as convenient as possible. Apart from design and usability, the integration with other customer touchpoints in banking (e.g., phone support, emails) also enhances user experience.
• Emails. It’s the most common channel of communication both for customers and bank representatives. Emails are always a part of the customer journey in banking. You send them when a customer has just opened an account, has a birthday, chooses to receive bank statements by email, etc.
• Call center. Large financial institutions need to provide phone support. Even though more and more customers fix their issues in online chats, many of them still prefer to talk with a support team. Ensure you store these conversations in your system and align your next communications with the previous customers’ requests.
• Bank departments. Despite the global digital transformation in financial services, people still like seeing bank representatives eye-to-eye. This experience is more substantial than all other customer touchpoints in banking, so don’t forget to pay particular attention to this channel.
• Offline notices. Financial organizations need to deliver tons of offline communications, including invoices, late payment notices, credit card statements, etc. They also belong to the customer touchpoints in banking and deserve a dedicated strategy.

To connect these customer journey banking touchpoints and track how people interact with your organization, you will need advanced automation services. They should enable you to understand customers and initiate conversations based on real-time customer behaviors. Apart from this, it’s crucial to integrate address verification and autocomplete services for data validation and AVS checks.

Importance of Address Verification and Timely Communication Delivery Across Customer Touch Points in Banking

Imagine a customer has requested you to deliver bank statements by mail instead of emails. You have their street address but lack address verification software to make sure it’s valid and mailable. You take the risk and start sending financial communications to the unreliable address, but they never reach the necessary person. As a result, the customer may go to another bank, have late payments, suffer from related fees, etc. In other words, their customer journey banking experience would be a disaster.

That’s why accurate data on customers is essential to connect customer touchpoints in banking. Without it, you would fail to communicate with people at different stages of their journey effectively.

The easiest way to implement address data verification and other kinds of data validation practices is automation software. Although there are some manual address checkers, they won’t cover the needs of large financial institutions. Only automated tools can effectively collect customer information, standardize, and clean it. Besides, such tools smoothly connect with third-party solutions, which means you can use them with your CRM, email automation software, social media tools, mobile device apps, and other services. This enables you to connect customer touchpoints in banking and unite multiple data sources to reach a single customer view.

Inkit’s Reach Enablement Platform is a way to verify customer data and instantly use it to deliver customer communications across multiple channels. Find more about its capabilities below.

Inkit’s Reach Enablement Platform for Connecting Customer Touch Points in Banking

Inkit is a reach enablement toolkit combining multiple services that can help you stay in touch with customers and vendors.

Inkit Verify checks address records that are manually or automatically uploaded to your system against the USPS database. It eliminates invalid addresses and fixes the format when necessary. Once the verification is completed, Inkit Render can use customer information to generate personalized communications and PDF documents, such as invoices, statements, late payment notices, etc. and deliver them to the necessary customers. Thanks to the rich integration capabilities of Inkit, you can send communications through multiple channels, both online and offline. This turns customer experience into a well-orchestrated sequence of touchpoints united with the same goal of increasing customer satisfaction.

Want to optimize your customer journey banking touch points with Inkit? Contact our sales team to get the demo.