Apple Bank

Linda Ward

The key responsibilities of my team run the lifecycle of marketing and customer acquisition, customer onboarding, engagement and digital adoption, customer service- both self-service and contact center, customer experience measurement,  cross sell and deepening customer relationships. My team is also responsible for the product management of all digital platforms and technology, debit card product management and engagement as well as contact center technology. Our team consists of the following functions:  Enterprise Marketing, Digital Strategy, Products, Innovation & Servicing, Customer Satisfaction, Contact Center and Digital Risk & Operations. I also lead the Bank’s efforts within Consumer Banking for Product Strategy, Development and Simplification.  Lastly, I also co-chair the Bank’s AI working group, a governance team that is setting the internal standards and direction for the organization for promoting adoption of AI toolsets and responsible use of AI to achieve operational efficiency and competitive advantage.

The connection of marketing and digital experience  is an area I am most passionate about as I pride myself on customer centricity. I think the key element that is missed here most often is customer segmentation. We often group customers by geography, demographics  or time period segments (Millennials, Boomers, Gen Y/Z etc.) and I think that is a mistake. We make assumptions that just because you are a certain generation you are more or less digitally savvy, are likely to open an account online or in a branch, will/won’t be interested in certain products, services or features, or won’t call us, or visit to a branch.

We have found over and over again that we have disproven the predictions. We assume that young people won’t call or go to a branch, older customers won’t open an account online or use digital banking and new money movement services.  That the  marketing for a product or service is standard and will appeal to anyone in market for that product. We have proven this is not the case. The marketing message for the exact same product or service has to vary based on the audience and the audience is more than location, age or segment. It is based on behavior and mindset. There are many Boomers that are fine to open an account online for the right product, there are large volumes of Millennials’ that need assistance with banking in general and even digital banking services as they do not have the financial maturity to understand how these services are relevant to them and they want personalized service and someone to walk them through it or educational content to explain to in a way they understand. Many people do not know what an APY is and why it is important for their savings. Essentially there are different level of digital savviness, financial maturity and product relevance in all generations and segments. We find it is better to target smaller groups of audiences with customized messages than a large segment with multiple attributes with a blanket message and our results have shown this.  We recommend weaving your marketing, servicing and digital capabilities into communications and messages based on audiences that may have different level of maturities across segments, and don’t make assumptions, you are likely  incorrect.  Look at your customer data and compare it with industry data (suggest not depending on articles without data) to inform your strategy and ensure you are spending your time of what matters most to your goals and strategic objectives.

“Essentially there are different level of digital savviness, financial maturity and product relevance in all generations and segments.”

We have found that organizing a small working group to make sense of your data has been most successful.  Often companies find that they have too much data, unorganized data, lack of accountability or are waiting on some other team to help inform them or or look at results. Data is a lot to tackle, and everyone thinks they need a complex enterprise data warehouse ( EDW) built out with extensive data dictionaries and data scientists to feed the business all the answers. Yes, that is what we all know is the desired state, but it is hard for companies, especially small to mid-sized banks that are dependent on vendor partners to bring the data together, and we have focused on a few key areas that were successful in making the data more structured across the datasets and provided the majority of what we needed for strategic or marketing decisions.

I partnered with another leader in our organization and we agreed we needed to  start somewhere and not overcomplicate it. Our data team needed business perspective, they were churning on how to organize the data and what mattered most.  There were business definitions required like, who do we consider a customer, what do we consider an active account, how do we consider the importance of a primary vs a secondary customer and what do we consider engagement, what is the importance of tenure. The challenge was the data team was compiling data and metrics but there was no logic behind what was being complied, and we were not using a standard across the organization so depending on who was pulling the data we had different answers to the same question.  We pulled together a small group of stakeholders and created a definition standards guide and applied it across all data sets to ensure consistency of our “denominator”.

This stakeholder team now drives data definition across the organization and now helps to drive the strategy for metrics and guidelines for the organization and is helping to define the data dictionary as well as which data sets are standard for those data elements as there may be several similar elements that could be available but are not always the same.

The other area that was a challenge for us was the lack of definition of how we define the marketing opportunity, analyze the auidences, compile the results of marketing and realized we needed to address the lack of robustness of what elements were important in our marketing results analysis. This is an area that we are still maturing but have made great progress given the efforts described above.  I think the biggest challenge is making sure your team makes the time to analyze results before you go on to the next thing.

We have to spend more time doubling down on what’s working and driving the results we are looking for and we are not just looking at a static number like a new accounts or digital enrollment, we know that with tight budgets and fierce competition having more depth of what we consider a successful conversion is critical to our future success.