Personalisation - The Future of Banking and Insurance

With Doug Morris, digital strategy director at Ratio we explore the role that digital personalisation will play in the future of banking and insurance. We delved into the role personalisation plays in delivering an improved customer experience and how personalisation could help enrich the day-to-day experiences a customer has with their bank and insurer. 

• The role personalisation plays in helping a potential customer identify which product, service or content is most relevant 
•  The importance of profiling customers needs and interests
•   The importance of delivering a joined-up experience across digital channels
• The role of personalisation in supporting the offline conversation 
• How personalisation can help elevate a bank or insurer from a product supplier to a trusted advisor

To get in touch with future questions or to be interviewed for a future episode, email hello@ratiopartners.co.uk or visit us at www.ratiopartners.co.uk

Transcript

RATIO Partners Re-imagining customer experiences in financial services Ep 2 - Transcript

[00:00:00] Mario Kyriacou: [00:00:00] welcome to another episode of our podcast, re-imagining customer experiences in financial services. I'm your host, Mario Kyriacou, co-founder of Ratio Fs, a marketing data and customer experience consultancy. This is the show where we look to analyze how Fs brands can leverage digital to deliver experiences built to solve your customer's day-to-day challenges.

[00:00:38] On today's episode, I'm pleased to be joined by Doug Morris, digital strategy director Ratio Fs as he takes us on a journey into why Fs brands should be seriously considering personalizing the digital customer experience. Doug has led numerous personalization projects over the years, super generous with his time, with sharing his [00:01:00] experience into the opportunity, which when executed correctly can bring enormous value to the customer and to the business's bottom line, as what is the very real pitfalls which businesses need to be aware of [00:01:11] So, they trade in the right line between providing genuine value and avoiding using data in a way which turns customers off. Well, welcome Doug to today's episode. 

[00:01:23] Doug Morris [00:01:23] Thanks Mario, it’s nice to be here. 

[00:01:26] Mario Kyriacou: [00:01:26] I'm looking forward to discussing this topic around the challenges that banks face in delivering a personalized customer experience. [00:01:34] It's something which, uh, I know from my personal experiences is a topic which comes up time and time again, it's something which is constantly referenced in top trends for the year ahead. Um, whenever likes of consultancy or Adobe are launching their, um, annual trends in financial services. It's always interesting to see [00:01:56] personalization, um, and delivering, you know, a personalized [00:02:00] omni-channel experience comes up as an area that banks are looking to invest in and focusing on the year ahead. But what we're here to talk about today is, you know, what is potentially holding banks back? What are the challenges? So, let's just dive straight in.

[00:02:13] So what do you think is holding banks back from delivering on the promise of personalization? 

[00:02:21] Doug Morris: [00:02:21] Yeah, so a good question. Um, you are dead right, If you go back and have a look at the last, you know, four years of digital trends in financial services, reports from Adobe, you see that customer journey management and personalization, uh, in general are priorities over and over again.

[00:02:40] In fact, almost the number one, number two or number three priority over and over again for all of these FSI companies. And yet, there's a massive gap still, uh, five years after they have, you know, set this as a priority between the experiences they're actually delivering and what their stated aspirations are.

[00:03:00] So, the starting point is, uh, there are few examples out there of FSI companies that are fully delivering on this objective that they have. There's a number of reasons for that. Uh, one of them is kind of, uh, the broader context in these organizations, which is that to do personalization really well requires having the right data in the right place to influence that experience.

[00:03:29] And all of these or many of these FSI companies have legacy, uh, core banking infrastructure uh, where they hold all the information about the customs for example and they're on within these five, seven-year programs to connect all of that technology together, inclusive of the callback infrastructure to have the right data in the right place.

[00:03:53] And few of them seem to be approaching it in an incremental or micro transformation manner [00:04:00] where they would be doing the best with what they have already. So, the fact that they haven't yet completed these transformation programs, uh, seems to be one of the problems preventing them from delivering on the personalization promise.

[00:04:12] Mario Kyriacou: [00:04:12] You mentioned data and connecting data silos has been one of the challenges, which I find interesting because, um, the conversations which I tend to hear on the podcast around this subject tend to be focused around, um, the technology, what technology they should have in place, um, how they can leverage it.

[00:04:32] And, it’s almost as if you're saying, you know, they need to take a step back and actually look at, um, technology as the last thing to focus on. So, in terms of, of, of beta, um, you know, FSI businesses, you know, insurance businesses, banks, um, you know, financial service players have lots of customer data. Is there a [00:04:57] specific focus on what customer [00:05:00] data sets they should be looking to leverage to, to begin to roll out personalization because, you know, connecting the data dots can be a multi-year project and there's, um, lots of challenges around getting access to, you know, um, sensitive customer information. I'm just curious to know, is there almost like a ladder approach for building out the business case start using this type of channel?

[00:05:24] Doug Morris: [00:05:24] Yeah, well, there are some commonalities in terms of what data dots haven't been connected. So, for example, most of the FSI companies we know with, we work with or talk to are having massive challenges bringing in like social data to that single customer view, for example, of what interactions that customers have on LinkedIn or Facebook or  else [00:05:45] and this is very good reasons why they're having challenges, getting access to that data. Uh, but other than that, um, there’s not necessarily a cookie cutter way that you should approach this in terms of a particular type of data, but [00:06:00] you should look at first, what you really need to do is kind of make an assessment about what data, what technology you already have access to.

[00:06:10] Um, and what data you already have in place to deliver this personalization and really take an incrementalistic view to starting to deliver with what you, what you already have rather than waiting until everything is joined together. Like you might otherwise, um, prefer to, or like that's, this seems to be the status quo.

[00:06:31] So, uh, from a website perspective, for example, NatWest in the UK, have a great take on this. They have a, It's personalization pyramid, um, and I'm going to try and explain it in a way that lets people visualize it, but everyone knows what a pyramid looks like. And at the pointy end of that pyramid is one-to-one personalization were, um, we're talking very small audiences. [00:06:59] We have, [00:07:00] um, that might require knowledge about who that person is from an offline perspective. So, bringing in that data from core banking systems and at the very base of the pyramid is contextual or behavioral targeting where we're dealing with much larger audiences and trying to deliver them some form of personalization for great user experience, um, and in between we have, you know, other sorts of personalization that kind of fit between those two different ideas.

[00:07:26] And it's a great way to think about, um, the different sorts of personalization you could be doing. And as you said, or implied thinking about how you can build it in layers, so almost everyone has the technology already to build the base layer, which is to do kind of a website personalization based on the website interactions.

[00:07:46] Um, and then over time as your transformation program brings online, more technology, more data points. You can start getting to the pointy end of the stick which probably delivers more business value, but isn't really achievable right now. Um, another thing [00:08:00] to think about is having some strategies in place to help you identify more [00:08:04] Website visitors or, um, to, to enhance your profile that you have about them. So, in the Adobe stack, for example, um, if you are populating a customer ID, when someone logs on to internet banking, um, then you can come into Adobe later and you can, you can upload a CSV of products that you want to target those customers with [00:08:26] and in that way, even though, um, you're, you haven't yet fully connected the dots, you can also start to, to deliver some more advanced personalization. 

[00:08:34] Mario Kyriacou: [00:08:34] Thank you Doug. And I I've, uh, I've done my best to visualize the pointy end of the pyramid as well. Um, I mean financial service institutions, um, in one sense, have, um, the potential to do a lot. [00:08:50] They have potentially larger budgets than the average, um, business out there yet at the same time, there's an awful lot they can do and perhaps [00:09:00] want to do. And personalization is just one thing of many things that they could invest their time and resources over the course of the year. Um, and like anything that requires, you know, time investment, it requires, you know, a business case for the pros and cons [00:09:16] you know, what values are you going to create for the customer and for the, for, for the institution, from your perspective, what should marketers put into building the business case, um, for, you know, acquiring resources for this project? 

[00:09:31] Doug Morris: [00:09:31] Yeah, great question and it is, uh, it is a challenge. Uh, look, there's, there's a number of different ways to, to approach this, which is also kind of dependent on how far advanced we are through the process [00:09:45] like have we already started to do any personalization or is it just something we're thinking about doing, um, what type of personalization are we doing, all of these things influence how, um, how effectively we can build a business case, in addition to of course, like what, [00:10:00] what type of organization we actually are.

[00:10:02] We like the B-C FSI company where the dots are all joined up very nicely, or are we a commercial bank, um, who were most businesses done through relationship managers and proving up financial impact from the websites Matata. So, there's lots of variables, but there's some different ways you can think about this.

[00:10:21] Um, think about this problem that probably applicable to most organizations. So firstly, we have kind of a macro view, so we're setting aside any consideration about who we're actually trying to target, um, from an audience segment perspective, what our actual hypothesis is as to how we want to personalize the experience and just look at the broader kind of commercial context.

[00:10:45] So there's lots of data out there about the impact of personalization and like hand-in-hand with that, the desire of consumers to have more seamless experience. McKinsey say that personalization can drive up to 15% revenue [00:11:00] growth for companies in financial services. So clearly when we talk about 15% revenue growth for a bank or an insurance company, we're talking about, um, initiatives far deeper than just kind of website personalization of the homepage to deliver those sorts of commercial outcomes.

[00:11:16] But it is one data point to show that the business cases there from a customer expectation point of view, there are lots of surveys, um, almost every survey where consumers were asked about this, um, whether indicating that they favor a consistent experience across channels provided it's not creepy, of course.

[00:11:35] And from a competitive point of view, we know that personalized products and service are a key way that FinTech companies are creating a competitive advantage through about the likes of Neo banks who are, um, using machine learning on your, on your transaction data to give you insights about your spending, or we have insurance companies who are drawing on data like your social profiles [00:12:00] in order to assess your risk and to set kind of a personalized and in many cases, lower premium.

[00:12:06] So, uh, there's a, there's a few different ways from it, from a macro perspective that we can say, um, that, you know, we should be doing it. And the reality is of course, to be honest, that almost every FSI company actually tells does understand is because most of them, as we just articulated, uh, a knee-deep in five-year transformation programs, trying to get the capability in place, um, from a technology point of view to actually achieve it.

[00:12:30] So, we know we should be doing it because customers expect it, because our competitors, uh, eroding our market share using it, um, and because there's data that actually works. And so, the second way to look at this is to try and think about how we can model approve the impact of the specific types of personalization that we intend on deploying [00:12:53] before we actually go ahead and do it. So, a simple example could be that someone comes to your website or an insurer. [00:13:00] They start the application process for car insurance and they complete it and we really should be trying to work out how much business impact we can expect to make, um, by implementing personalization to address that, that problem.

[00:13:14] So let's say we had the idea that we could implement a homepage banner where the call to action to continue the application flow the person just dropped that off, that'd be probably the simplest and most common example of website personalization. Uh, we could look at the number of visitors that returned to the home page, having failed to complete an application, like what is the actual audience size of the audience segment [00:13:34] we want to create this experience for. What percentage of those already continue back to the application form. Um, what is kind of the, uh, head room that we have to improve against, um, and, and then do some modeling basically to work out like, um, how many more visitors do we expect to get back to the application journey, try and work out financially, what it'll be worth to us. [00:13:56] Um, try and create a model about, with some assumptions around [00:14:00] what the value of that customer would be, um, If they did actually complete the application and just really try and nail down the, the math, um, with some conservative assumptions made about how much money we're going to make here, we actually do this personalization and therefore, is it worth the effort because it's not always 00:14:15] worth the effort, um, there is some tiny audience segments that it's just simply not worth personalizing for and, uh, well, our view is that you should do this because, uh, um, not just for commercial outcomes, because it improves the customer experience, obviously, uh, delivering an ROI is quite important. Um, so yeah, so like that's, I guess before we start doing any personalization, we should be trying to prioritize these ideas that we have on the basis of some form of business case.

[00:14:43] Um, and when we actually do try and test things, uh, well, I just gave it away really, but, um, we shouldn't just launch these personalization rules into say, well, hey, like wipe our hands, job done, um, now we're, now we've successfully delivered on the ROI that we kind of [00:15:00] forecast. Wherever possible, we should be [00:15:02] AB testing this personalization, just like any other enhancement to your website. So, you really should be treating this as a, as a personalization scenario as a hypothesis that you could be wrong about. Um, and the only way to identify that is if you're on a controlled test and ideally of course, you revisit the rules over time and, and make sure they continue to deliver the ROI that you hope for.

 [00:15:22] Really though, when we talk about a business case, we mean the actual dollars, actual proven incremental dollars, um, that resulted from it versus the cost to execute. And depending on the type of organization and the personalization we want to achieve that could be next to impossible, as I mentioned, commercial banking, this an example where you have an RM, that's actually making a sale.

[00:15:44] How do you link that back to what happened on the website? very hard. Um, and so, you know, as I've articulated, you need some other, um, other strategies that can help you to kind of narrow down on what the return on investment could be, um, even if you can’t actually prove it.

[00:16:00] Mario Kyriacou: [00:16:00] I mean, I suppose the part, a strong part of building, any sort of, I suppose, um, a strong business case is where you focus initially [00:16:08] and for a lot of these institutions, I've heard a, uh, so the common refrain, which is, you know, we've got so much that we can be doing that we don't know where to begin or what to focus on and the different teams control different parts of, um, different products with different parts of the experience. [00:16:29] And, I suppose the question is a part of building that business case is, if you were marks on in working that, you know, a big insurer or legacy bank, um, and you had to decide where should you start your initial personalization steps? How would you go about defining where to start? And then I suppose understanding what good personalization is going to look like for those initial steps?

 [00:06:54] Doug Morris: [00:06:54] The first challenge here and I think this is a challenge because, um, [00:17:00] not much personalization is actually happening right now, um, from a, from a website point of view is to kind of understand how you should think about it philosophically. Um, not before we dive into, like, how do we identify a specific, good hypothesis that we should be acting on [00:17:16] or how do we prioritize that, and so I kind of did intimate this before, but from a philosophical point of view, um, at least to us, good personalization solves for the customer and the business simultaneously. So, I provide an example, which is a journey that we built for, uh, for a commercial bank. They had a set of product pages with call to actions where someone could throw a branch locater, and then they had a branch locater, obviously where people can find, um, find branches to go in and

[00:17:46] talk to someone about their account or apply for a product or whatever, and the product pages and what people were doing there were completely disconnected from what was happening from a branch locater perspective, but the two types of content were completely disconnected from each other. And, [00:18:00] um, the question is, how do we go about personalizing that? [00:18:04] And should we? so we know there's kind of a commercial incentive to do, to, to personalize that journey because we want to make it easier and more straightforward for people to apply for our products. Um, so that more people will actually apply so that we make more profit. So, the, the business case from a commercial perspective is clear, but that's where a lot of people get to is understanding that there could be some money that they could make from, from doing this, but not understanding what, like, how to think about, um, how to understand what personalization can actually do.

[00:18:38] And that's where the kind of, uh, customer centric thinking comes in and having some empathy for the experience of the people that are actually going through that journey, because really what we want is a way that we can deliver on the commercial outcome by making their experience better as well. So, it might, we might do that a journey map and think about what the pain points would be [00:18:56] if those two pages remain disconnected. So perhaps users go into the wrong branch [00:19:00] because it's not the one that is not one that actually accepts applications for that product or maybe, um, almost certainly there's some sort of documentation requirement in order to actually successfully complete the application with the branch and the customer under the status quo where those two Genesis might end up in a branch that either doesn't accept their application or can't accept it because they don't have the right documentation.

[00:19:23] So this scenario, we solve those pain points by using personalization. Um, when a user clicks through to the branch locator from a product page, we made it clear which branches could actually a second application for this product and we provided a call of action um, to a document checklist so they could make sure that they're actually going to have the right information at hand when they do go into the branch.

[00:19:42] That's an example of how to think about, um, thinking about personalization from a, from a kind of commercial and a customer context. And ideally you can marry those two things together. Um, it's not always the case, not always necessary, Of course we know examples of, um, of banks that are doing personalization in, uh, [00:20:00] internet banking in order to promote kind of a next best offer [00:20:02] Um, identify people eligible for particular product who they think are likely to take it and, and promote that specific product. There's not really a customer experience improvement there. Um, but, but, um, definitely from like ideation point of view, to try and work out, um, where the opportunities are, um, having that empathy and that customer centricity full process, it's quite important.

[00:20:26] Mario Kyriacou: [00:20:26] One of the challenges which I've seen crop up and perhaps this is a reflection of the type of experiences that individuals have when dealing with the big technology companies like Google is their ability to deliver contextual, personalized experiences, um, in real time, um, that's not, that's not something that's easy to do, especially within the context of big established businesses with legacy systems, you know, and different marketing technologies, power in different parts of [00:21:00] the customer experience.

[00:21:02] So from your perspective, how real is the challenge around delivering personalization, you know, real time and how much of that is holding marketers back from delivering on these types of experiences? 

[00:21:14] Doug Morris: [00:21:14] It's a, it's a massive challenge for almost every organization, FSI organization that we work with or that we talk to [00:21:20] and it's a challenge that there is not really a super bullet for it, unfortunately, because either you have the technology processes, infrastructure in place to deliver that the real-time view of the customer need or you don't. And the reality is that this idea of data automation is actually one of the biggest sticking blocks in many FSI marketing transformation programs, along with the absence of certain channels from a single customer view, like social as we discussed.

[00:21:54] So an example of where this falls flat at the moment would be again, a commercial banking [00:22:00] client we have who are using Eloqua for email and text marketing automation. And currently it takes them about three weeks to have a list that they trust in order to send some form of communication, give it just like a batch and blast email sent.

[00:22:15] And there's no way that a three-week timeframe is going to be sufficient when it comes to, for example, automating an application, abandonment email, sending an email to someone who's just stopped their current account application. Um, because probably those users are going to either complete the application or go somewhere else within 24, 48 hours of abandoning the application flow [00:22:42] So if it took us three weeks to send an email to someone who needed it within 24 to 48 hours, that's not workable. So, we know that, uh, this concept of data automation, data automation pipelines are a massive sticking block, It's not going away anytime [00:23:00] soon. And yet we know that in many scenarios, we do have the necessity to communicate more in real time and that the personalization won't actually be effective unless we do communicate in real time.

[00:23:12] So, so I mean, there's the status, where is that, it’s something that we need to be pragmatic about again, and that we need to plan for. So, I mentioned the idea of a customer journey map before which can help you lay out the interactions a customer has with you over a specific journey and where their pain points are over time and so on and so forth.

[00:23:34] And this is another thing we need to think about, so, we've identified a customer problem that we're trying to solve, and we know that we have a piece of technology that can solve that problem. Well, the question is, um, can that piece of technology, actually respond in real time in order to solve that problem?

[00:23:55] Or will it be another case where we need to do a batch upload every fortnight, [00:24:00] um, of data to that, that platform. And if it's the case that, um, we can't respond quickly enough to what that specific customer problem is, then unfortunately it's something that we might need to set aside until we have completed this kind of broader transformation program when we have the, the, the building blocks in place.

[00:24:21] Um, so yeah, it's about being, being pragmatic and thinking about what the problem is, do we have any, do we have data that's sufficient in real time to, to solve that problem. Um, do, do we have any signals that the customers already solved the problem that could, could help us to remove them from a personalization audience before they see a, um, kind of an out-of-date communication? [00:24:46] Um, and yeah, right now it's honestly the case that there's some hustling problems you actually shouldn't attempt to solve a personalization because you just can't do it effectively. 

[00:24:54] Mario Kyriacou: [00:24:54] Okay. I mean, that kind of leads into what I wanted to cover off next, really, which is [00:25:00] Mark's and teams are busy, they're stretched with their, uh, standing up with BAU, just, you know, keep doing what they're doing on a day-to-day basis.

[00:25:08] And, you know, new initiatives can be difficult from a time perspective, having a time to carve out, um, extra effort, work on, you know, new initiatives and with personalization, one of the things I've heard is uh, sort of fear around the clunky rules-based nature of personalization, you know, whereas insurers banks have millions of customers [00:25:33] they have dozens of products. It's a complex business that they are looking to promote and management day-to-day basis, and they are looking for ways to scale and the initiative so they can begin to reap the benefits at a much higher level. So, if you're a busy stretch team, and then you are marketing to potentially in the millions of customers and selling dozens of products. [00:25:58] Is there a, is there [00:26:00] a way to begin to scale? and I suppose automate there, I suppose automation is, you know, is the big word is to scale and automate their personalization initiatives so they can kind of step back and focus more on optimizing as opposed to just managing it day-to-day.

 [00:26:16] Doug Morris: [00:26:16] Okay. So, there's a few different ways to look at this question that you've asked. [00:26:21] The first one, just thinking about it from the perspective of a time poor marketer who already have existing campaigns to execute on is why they should invest in incremental effort to add personalization full-stop. And the answer to that would be that personalization is going to help you to achieve more of the objective that you're already working towards. [00:26:39] So it's not something that is targeted towards achieving some KPI or objective that is not already important to you. It's actually going to help you be more successful If you're trying to drive uptake of digital tools, if you're trying to, um, if you're trying to drive applications for particular, product [00:27:00] personalization is another tool in your toolbox that can help you achieve that.

[00:27:02] So it's definitely worth considering from that point of view, rather than thinking at some alien concepts that, um, that isn't really helping you achieve what you need to already on a day-to-day basis. The second thing to think about when you're thinking about scaling personalization, is that you, as you build, deploy and release these personalized experiences, while you are adding a bit of an overhead on an ongoing basis, to make sure that that experience is actually still up-to-date the content still right, [00:27:31] It's still delivering a return on investment, the, as long as that, those things remain true and that you can keep the personalization we're running, It's going to keep delivering ROI or business impact day after day, without you needing to actively do it or to influence it. Unlike the sorts of, um, sorts of marketing activities who might be used to like sending a batch and blast email, where it actually takes incremental human effort for every single email you want to send you start putting people into marketing [00:28:00] automation plans.

[00:28:01] Um, and once you built the plan and you're adding people to it, the emails get sent every day without you actually needing to think about how to construct a new email that day. So, um, from a, from a return on effort, point of view, there's kind of an ongoing capacity compound interest effect from deploying these personalization layers, where there isn't necessarily the type of type of marketing we might already be doing.

[00:28:25] But the third thing to think about unpacking a question there is what and how we get to the, the Nirvana where, you know, every, every customer coming to the website, every prospect coming to the website actually does receive a personalized experience in a context where we have thousands of, or hundreds of different products.[00:28:46] And I think we do need to be realistic, that to get to that stage, it probably does mean bringing in AI or machine learning assisted tools, rather than trying to build the rules out with humans, well human effort. [00:29:00] So going back to the NatWest example, um, at the pointy end of the stick, you might indeed manually define some, um, some personalization rules based on CRM data, broken and safe.

[00:29:13] But what do we do about the large slots of anonymous visitors who are coming to our website for the first time entering on the homepage, like, how do you as a human assess, what to do with that group? How do you work out how to improve their experience? How do you work out what signals are telling you, [00:29:30] what type of content they should be seeing? The reality is that this is beyond most, if not all humans to actually do, but it's not beyond, not beyond the possibilities If you're using a, uh, an artificial intelligence or machine learning, uh, assisted tool. So, AI or machine learning, you can spot for example, that, um, someone coming from a particular geography on a particular time of day on a particular device type, um, that, that pattern of characteristics mean [00:30:00] that that person would be more likely to engage with a specific product.

[00:30:03] And that's something that humans can never going to be able to do, so, to really, really scale, we need to be, uh, we need to be looking at bringing in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Um, some examples of that I've seen, uh, in the navigation menu, for example, using AI to promote some quick links, um, determined, like what link the person is most likely to want to get to, um, and promote that and special section in the navigation, or perhaps having promotion tiles on the homepage [00:30:32] using AI to determine what, what product someone is most likely to want to engage with. Those are some tactics that you can use to deliver a more relevant experience without humans needing to actually take care of it. 

[00:30:44] Mario Kyriacou: [00:30:44] On a recent episode, we, um, uh, on the podcast, we, I interviewed Chris Probert, data practice lead at Capco, and we talked about thoughts about the use of data and especially around the governance and the ethics around [00:31:00] leveraging customer data. [00:31:01] And from my perspective, that kind of feeds into one of the big challenges around personalization that isn't necessarily that you can personalize the experience, um, uh, customers across multiple channels, uh, it's more around uh, why and how they should and up to what point, I mean, from my experience, I noticed lots of individuals within, you know, insurers and banks who are scared.

[00:31:30] They live in Jesus' house of them in terms of, you know, accessing client information and making the experience, I suppose, too personalized, you know, edging towards creepy and trying to figure out what is the balance between delivering more value and, you know, just not overstepping that mark, where all of a sudden you become a PR nightmare across Manafort news. [00:31:52] How should an FSI approach the use of what is very sensitive customer information?

[00:31:59] Doug Morris: [00:31:59] I do not think there's a black [00:32:00] and white answer to your question. There's a couple of different ways to think about it though. The first one, I don't think enough FSI companies are actually thinking about because it's not, um, it's not what they used to doing, which is how they set expectations with users and how they be upfront with users about how and where that user's data will be used.

[00:32:23] And I'm saying that I don't think it's about enough because this kind of transparency putting things in, In, uh, in everyday language that people understand is not necessarily something that FSI companies had been good at traditionally. But if we look at Monzo, for example, they have obviously a cookie batter on their website to comply with GDPR. [00:32:50] And rather than having some really, um, hard to understand terminology in there about what and why they're using those cookies [00:33:00] for. Um, they have a message that is really easy to understand and is consistent with their brand personality as well. So just read it briefly. Um, they asked, can we use optional cookies?

[00:33:12] We're not talking about the crunchy tasty client. These cookies help us keep our websites safe, give you a better experience and show more relevant ads. You want to turn the one less you accept. And then when they describe how and why they use individual cookies, they talk about their analytics cookies, for example.

[00:33:28] And they say that these are cookies that give you a better experience, they use them to see what you spend time on your website and work out, which possibly would have cited most and least effective, help us know, help them know what's working, what might be broken and what they should improve and so on. So yeah, that, that really is one part of it, which is before you even think about confronting these users with an experience that they might consider to be a little bit creepy, make sure that a, that, that [00:33:55] they have a clear expectation of what you're going to be doing with their data in the first [00:34:00] place. Um, the second part to that, the question that you posed though is obviously from an internal perspective, um, all of the risks associated with personalization with sharing data more, more widely within an FSI company.

[00:34:18] And yeah, of course there are risks there that we need to manage. Um, so, If we want to reach this Nirvana, where we are delivering all of these amazing personalized experiences based on what we know about someone in a CRM system and that means giving more people access to more data and, uh, and breaking down data silos and trying to operate, operationalize that data [00:34:43] and, this is something that, um, like I know for sure that all of these, uh, FSI companies are already thinking about as part of their transformation programs, but, um, it means for example, that marketing need to have better relationships and more proactive [00:35:00] relationships with the people in risk and compliance.

[00:35:03] But as compliance departments can't really be any more in that kind of advice and consent role. It needs to be more of a partnership now, needs to be beyond offering advice about what the risk is associated with, what you want to do, and actually become a kind of an active coroner of those risks. And the other thing to think about there is that, um, I mean, we're talking about responding really quickly in real time to what these customer needs are.

[00:35:28] But the reality is that this, uh, this compliance process has actually traditionally been a bit of a bottleneck to delivering those experiences in real time. So not only are these partnerships with the risk and compliance teams, ones that will make sure what you're doing is safe. It's also going to let you deliver personalization with more agility [00:35:49] um, and that's what we really need to be aspiring to.

[00:35:54] Mario Kyriacou: [00:35:54] Okay, that makes sense. I mean, I think there's a, um, a lot of an awful lot of businesses who treat [00:36:00] the use of customer data as a gray area and I think I like the idea of just being transparent and open around, you know, why collecting customer data and how you intend to use it.

[00:36:10] And letting people know is completely optional. Whether you know, their, their, their brand that they engage with actually uses that data having that's a good, safe first step. 

[00:36:22] Doug Morris: [00:36:22] Yeah. I mean, you referenced earlier the various different studies about the fact that consumers do want this, this personalized, consistent experience across all the different channels they're interacting with you on.

[00:36:34] So I don't think people are not naive to, um, to what you need to do from a, from a data point of view, maybe to make that happen. Um, but it is still important to set that expectation and make sure you're being transparent about what you're doing, um, rather than just not being transparent and delivering them a message they might not think is a bit [00:37:00] invasive, but they didn't know how, why you would do it.

[00:37:04] The simple way to think about it though was mentioned in a, in a couple of sentences by Chris Probert, the data practice leader at Capco on one of our recent episodes. And he simply said, when you're considering this personalization and considering using customer data, finally a simple way you can think about it [00:37:23] It's just simply to ask yourself how much value to the customer are we going to be delivering by using the data in this way, and only, only try and execute on the things that legitimately will deliver them value from using that data. And that's the way that you can avoid any of the pitfalls associated with, with being a bit creepy.

[00:37:44] Mario Kyriacou: [00:37:44] Brilliant, thank you, Doug. Um, I mean, it's a million more things I could, I could, uh, ask you around personalization, but, uh, uh, uh, I, I appreciate all good things must come to an end and we've come to the end of our allotted time. So, thank you very much for joining me on today's episode, talking about the challenges [00:38:00] around deploying personalization.

[00:38:01] Doug Morris: [00:38:01] My pleasure, anytime.