Younger generations are almost twice as likely to want a one-stop shop for their financial and insurance needs than baby boomers and seniors (57% vs. 28%). They want access to a wide range of products—like savings accounts, investment options, loans, insurance, and retirement planning—through a single provider. This type of customer experience makes it easier for them to manage all aspects of their financial life in one place.
For these consumers, that also means providing educational content and tools around overall financial well-being and personalizing marketing messaging to cater to their individual needs.
All these principles help create a cohesive customer experience for younger generations—read on to find out how you can apply them to your own financial institution.
4 tips to enhance your financial institution’s customer experience
Today, crafting a positive customer experience—both online and off—is a great way to build and maintain loyalty for any business, especially financial institutions.
1. Meet consumers on their preferred channels to create a seamless experience
Consumers—especially younger consumers—expect a seamless omnichannel experience from businesses, and this goes doubly so for financial institutions. Customers and members want to manage their finances and insurance on the web, on mobile apps, and at physical branches.
This means empowering customers to control their financial journey while offering convenient support when (and where) it’s needed. Specifically, this can refer to self-service options and 24/7 accessibility.
Younger generations appreciate the ability to handle tasks on their own and expect financial services to be available at any time. Offering intuitive self-service tools, automated help features, and access to digital customer support via chat or messaging around the clock enhances convenience.
2. Personalize the customer experience to suit your target audience
Personalizing your customer experience and your marketing strategies is a crucial aspect of reaching the right customer with the right message. Personalization increases brand loyalty, customer engagement, and customer satisfaction, all of which open up the door for new customer or member acquisition (and better retention).
You’re likely engaging in some form of personalization already, but it’s important to consider whether hiring a partner that specializes in marketing data science could be beneficial. An appropriate partner takes a data-driven approach to personalization and audience segmentation, transforming and enhancing customer data to make it more suitable for model building and machine learning algorithms.
Customer segments are also defined by a wealth of markers, including similarities in behavior, demographic data, media propensity, and purchase history. These various sources all feed into predictive models that can accurately estimate receptiveness to products and promotions—even through different forms of media.
This is key for reaching younger demographics since their behavior and preferred channels can vary so widely from their older counterparts.
3. Provide financial education and resources
Ensuring that your marketing approach is multichannel is one thing, but what about the content itself?
Part of striving to be a one-stop shop financial institution includes offering education and resources around financial topics. This refers to personal finance, debt, and wealth-building, but it can also mean education around supplemental insurance.
The financial world is difficult to navigate for many consumers, especially young people trying to make sense of these important subjects for the first time. Providing helpful information that puts them on the right track will garner trust and build loyalty over time.
Considering that 82% of consumers aged 18-24 acquired a financial services product from a new provider in the past 12 months, it stands to reason that creating content and offering services that they’re currently finding elsewhere will help retain existing customers—and attract ones that are part of the cohort primed to enter new relationships.
Budgeting tools, savings goals, and gamified features that reward users for healthy financial habits can appeal to younger generations who prioritize financial education. Offering interactive financial literacy resources, such as webinars or tutorials within your app, is also beneficial.
4. Offer tailored products that address customers’ greater financial needs
One thing is clear: Consumer demand for insurance products from their primary financial institution is growing.
In fact, roughly one third of consumers are more interested in buying insurance from their primary FI than they were three years ago. For Gen Z? This equates to 44% of those surveyed, so there’s a huge opportunity to enrich their experience by offering insurance products—especially insurance products tailored to their lifestyles.
For example, a young family with kids may be searching for life insurance to protect lost income whereas a single person changing careers may need accidental death and disability (AD&D) should they become unable to work.
Adding these types of supplemental insurance products to your offerings shows an attention to the needs of your customer or member base. Personalized marketing around them—like direct mail and email—is also an excellent way to raise brand awareness, increase customer loyalty, improve retention, and create new opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.
Let Franklin Madison help usher your customer experience into the future
If you’re keen on expanding your services to include insurance products that make your customers or members feel seen, Franklin Madison is the partner to have.
From a wealth of data gathered over 50 years of working with insurance to a suite of supplemental products covering a wide breadth of needs and life stages, we’re primed to help you take the next step in bolstering your customer experience.
Contact us today to see how we can help you reach new consumers in younger generations, older consumers who have been with you for the long haul, and everyone in-between.