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CX Education 05: Learn how personalized messaging helps expand your customer base with Christopher Young from Adobe

Join Christopher Young and Heather Share as they dive into customer experience in the financial services industry. 

Learn how personalized messaging helps expand your customer base with Christopher Young from Adobe
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About this episode

Digital transformation is here for the long haul, and businesses that want to stay afloat must go through it. But in conservative industries like finance, change comes with many challenges, especially if the executive team is not open to innovation and is worried about the effect it might have.

So it’s critical to keep the conversation about entering and conquering the digital space alive. The more information financial institutions have, the more confident they’ll feel about taking that step. After all, people spend more time online and want to access various products and services there.

In this episode of CX Education, Christopher Young, the Director of Industry Strategy & Marketing for Financial Services at Adobe, joins our host Heather Share to discuss customer experience in the digital space, primarily in finance.

Chris discusses the challenges financial institutions face when establishing the tools, processes, and channels for client-company communication. He also talks about the importance of being where your customers are and communicating with younger generations, as that’s the path to growing your customer base in the future.

Find out more about how you can shift personalization into overdrive with the latest Adobe e-book.

Image for Christopher Young, Director Industry Strategy & Marketing, Financial Services | Adobe

Guest Speaker

Christopher Young, Director Industry Strategy & Marketing, Financial Services | Adobe

As Director of Industry Strategy for Financial Services at Adobe, Christopher Young leads a team of industry specialists who work with Adobe’s financial services clients to help them develop best-in-class digital marketing strategies using Adobe Experience Cloud. Prior to joining Adobe, Young spent more than eight years at E*TRADE Financial, where his last position was vice president of brokerage marketing. Prior to E*TRADE, he was the vice president of retail advertising at JPMorgan Chase. Young also has extensive agency experience working with a range of clients across traditional, direct and digital advertising and marketing programs. 

Image for Heather Share, Product Adoption Manager | Sinch

Host

Heather Share, Product Adoption Manager | Sinch

Heather Share creates a visual landscape of possibilities for global businesses navigating ever-growing customer needs.

20 years of creating best-fit solutions in the SaaS platform world firmly places Heather as a leader in the space who is ideally positioned to help businesses achieve growth plans for retention, loyalty, and new business.

As a Product Adoption Manager at Sinch, Heather guides clients through emerging channels growing in popularity worldwide and promotes the importance of a conversational strategy.

Image for Key insights

Key insights

The increased use of technology and the internet has influenced customers’ preferences and reshaped their needs. Financial institutions that want to stay relevant in the market and continue to grow must stay atop innovations and make the most of the digital channels available. That way, they become part of the entire customer journey: prior to, during, and after a purchase. After all, when clients feel their needs are heard, they are more likely to stay with a particular organization. ”The key thing for financial services is loyalty. And loyalty has been put at risk with a lot of everything — the pandemic, digital entrance, all of these things. So that puts a lot of pressure on our financial services customers. There was a huge change in journeys.” 

Asked how he would rank financial institutions in terms of their digital experience – Christopher shares results from an Adobe Digital Trends Report. They had around 500 respondents from the financial services industry. One of the questions was, “How would you rate your digital experience in keeping up with customer expectations?” Around 70% of those surveyed claimed they are keeping pace or staying ahead, while 30% are lagging. However, they also got some additional insights. ”The same survey indicated that the marketing executives, 90 plus percent, said that the key to future success is the agility of the marketing department. And to be clear, it’s not about applying an agile methodology, but it’s for their teams to be able to move fast to rapidly respond to a customer’s changing needs. So if there is a situation, consumers are going to react very differently, and it’s how quickly you’re able to respond to deliver on those experiences.”

Again, technology grows, and companies experiment with various tools and methods to streamline procedures. AI is here to stay, and more and more companies use robo-advisors. But, as our guest says, people will still want to talk to a real person on specific occasions. ”At some point, someone thought that this would replace the human advisor altogether or we’ll never need a call center again. But the reality is that it’s going to be a mix, and it’s gonna be a mix based on the preference of the individual and the particular situation they’re in. You might need some much higher level of financial advice that a robo-advisor isn’t designed to provide. That’s where you would want the expertise of a human that could complement your whole range of experiences.”

Episode highlights

Create personalized messaging for an individual’s specific needs

”The best way to start is with the problems that our financial services customers are trying to solve. And that is this concept of personalization but at scale. So that’s meeting that expectation that any information, product, or service is available to that individual consumer in context, in their moment of need, and that it’s unique to them.”

Build your future customer base by focusing on young generations

”Let me introduce an entirely different concept – Moments that matter. There are specific moments that are important to you. It could be buying that first home, getting that first credit card, or getting a virtual replacement card when you travel overseas.

You have to comb through that data for those insights to be there in those moments because that’s what’s going to submit a relationship for a lifetime. So that may not be the day-to-day, but it counts. So that’s when you gotta be there.”

Be more customer-centric and think about what the consumer wants

”If the consumer is going to do more online and over their phone, and that’s where they’re going to be, then the types of experiences cannot be purely transactional. […] So, how do we infuse guidance and empathy if you’re not meeting with someone face to face? How do you infuse some of these elements into that experience to help people make smarter decisions and help them feel more confident, to help them feel reassured?”
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