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Customer Journey Orchestration for the Retail Bank of the Future

By 01.14.19
Reading time: 4 minutes

As a Solution Architect, my greatest reward comes from enabling clients with the tools and strategies needed to engage audiences in an increasingly connected marketplace. Journey orchestration is at the forefront of audience engagement, and Silverline is shaping the future of connected consumer data points with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and marketing automation tools.

Standing in the midst of the 4th Industrial Revolution, traditional banks are still carrying the weight of siloed legacy systems. By their very nature, these systems are roadblocks that must be overcome to clear the way for agility and innovation that place the customer exactly where they want to be: in the center of the banking experience, personalized for their needs. All banks would be well-served by paying attention to the way technology is disrupting the retail bank space by providing individualized experience customers want.

The Rise of Neo-Banks and Demand for Digital Innovation

A recent article in the New York Times highlights the inroads non-traditional banks are making into the business of innovation. Neo-banks, or non-traditional banks, emerged around five years ago beginning in the UK as a response to customer demand, fueled by venture capital dollars looking for the next iteration of financial services innovation and disruption. These smaller nontraditional banks are doing a better job meeting their customers’ needs, in part because they’ve made their app-driven, mobility-enabled banking technology a core part of their product offering to their customers.

Silverline, leveraging the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, is putting our customers at the forefront of innovation in the financial services market. We have deep expertise on both the tech side and the customer experience side of the financial services business. This allows us to help our customers to not only create that single source of truth that covers the breadth of your business but also to leverage that source of truth to improve the customer’s overall experience with marketing, loan officers, tellers, and every other touch point.

How Does Innovation Through Disruption Take Shape?

One customer quoted in the New York Times article received her paycheck two days sooner after switching to a non-traditional bank and dumped the fees traditional banks had been pulling from her account. People want to keep more of their money, and they want the ease and immediate satisfaction of a retail shopping experience, stoked by expectations set by online retailers like Amazon. (In fact, there are rumors Amazon will start offering a basic checking account soon.) It’s clear that banks need to innovate to continue to stay competitive. Journey Orchestration is the path to value through disruption for banks and customers alike because it will lead to a positive fundamental change of the organization’s value propositions.

Instead of ‘Marketing Automation’ Think ‘Journey Orchestration’

The broad definition of orchestration within solution development is the ‘planning or coordination of the elements of a situation to produce the desired effect.’ Much like the composition of a piece of music, a customer’s journey with a banking institution is only as harmonious and pleasing as the disparate parts (or touch points of engagement) that contribute to the overall tune or journey. The goal is to have the customer at the forefront of thought and design, every step of the way.

For our purposes, Journey Orchestration is gauging where a customer is on their journey with your business. Then, based on their engagement across any single touch point with your brand, whether it’s an email, a visit to the ATM, or a conversation they had on the street with a sales rep, the next message they receive from your business is specific to their future need, as informed by those touch points.

This level of functionality is possible because Financial Services Cloud is vertically built to exist on top of the Salesforce Platform, leveraging the power of Einstein, Lightning, IoT Cloud, Heroku, Analytics Cloud, and AppExchange tools, allowing us to fully and dynamically customize the Journey Orchestration a financial institution needs to be successful. The path becomes adaptive and responsive to the customer’s need while connecting the dots between platform functionality and trust, a key component to a positive experience that wins future business from your customer.

Journey Orchestration Provides Positive Retail Banking Experiences

Silverline’s Marketing Automation team has deep expertise in the Financial Services and Retail Banking industry, coupled with a breadth of technological prowess. We bring together industry experts alongside core platform experts to ensure your technology stack delivers the solid customer experience your client demands. Getting the core of your platform right, where your data lives, is key to providing the right message at the right time for your client.

Salesforce and Silverline have positioned themselves to help banks shift to a vertical, customer-centric model of platform design and engagement, exactly what neo-banks are doing for their customers. They understand that predictive needs are predictive leads. A predictive need is when you see your customer exhibit a pattern of consumer behavior that indicates an opportunity for your business to create a custom journey and turn that predictive need into a predictive lead for your business.

Journey Orchestration Success Story

For example, one of our clients, a mid-level retail bank, had incorporated a customer Journey Orchestration team in-house. They were using blast emails based on spreadsheets of what the customer didn’t have in their portfolio, based on searches through disparate systems of information. The team needed tools to capture the online interactions of their customers, including with competitors, in a single location that would allow them to create a single source of truth.

Silverline’s Marketing Automation team helped the client’s in-house team map out where to start the customer journey from the customer’s perspective, capturing the data touch points the client needed to create a personalized journey for their customers. For instance, if a customer is opening their first checking account and starting their first job out of University, the team could now market to the customer differently than a person who opens a checking account but is retired and just made a move across the country. Analytics and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud helped weigh all of the choices, needs, and social media behavior of their customer and turn those interactions into predictive leads, using a single source of truth they could count on, instead of multiple spreadsheets and manual processes.

The future of banking is placing the customer at the center or every interaction and building those interactions based on their personal needs. Journey Orchestration with Salesforce for Financial Services has just begun to reveal the potential it holds for the financial services marketing space.

Whether you’re new to Journey Orchestration with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud or seeking to incorporate a Journey Orchestration practice into your existing Salesforce instance, Silverline’s Marketing Automation Practice stands ready to help

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