innovation Archives - Omnichannel Personalization SaaS Solution

16 Jan
2017

The Best in Banking Personalization: USAA’S Innovative Customer Service

Legendary Service in the Digital Age

USAA is known for providing great service. Don’t believe it? The Temkin list of companies with the best customer service ranks USAA as No. 1 and has done so for the past five years. Why is USAA so highly ranked? USAA is passionate about providing the best in financial services to the men, women, and families involved with the military. According to the President of Property/Casualty insurance, Wayne Peacock, “that passion is what fuels our focus on delivering an exceptional member experience by listening to our members and constantly innovating to meet their needs.”

USAA’s goal is to bring the best customer service experience to each and every member. USAA has worked to create a heightened customer experience through enhancing services available in their mobile application as well as omnichannel customer service. Let’s explore how USAA is leading the way in using omnichannel personalization to create a better customer experience.

Mobile App

USAA has changed their mobile application to make it easy for members to navigate. Members can now easily access all features and functions within the mobile app; however, there is a focus on what each member does most frequently.

USAA begins the personalization from the moment a member opens the mobile app. The interface of the USAA app looks the same. However, the iteration per member differs. Personalized landing pages are a key feature of the app. These pages show the tasks each member does most frequently and their accounts. The products and services a member may see on the mobile app coincide with the products and services they have with USAA. If a member has a financial account with USAA, they will be able to see only relevant banking information on the account.

USAA has also made their app more user-friendly by integrating personalization and omnichannel interactions to the mobile app. Within the mobile application, customer context provides highly personalized information that the company and its members share between each other. This information is synced up across channels. For example, a member can make a payment online and see that same activity on the mobile application. By having the app customize to each member’s omnichannel interactions, USAA can better serve and help its members by highlighting that which matters to each member.

Functionality

Sharing information across channels has given USAA a way to effectively provide omnichannel customer service to its members as well. Members can now get immediate service anywhere, at any time, and from any device.

USAA has implemented a contact handoff system. When a member clicks “Contact Us” in the mobile app, they are connected to a service representative. These service representatives are provided information about the member and what they were looking for, before actually speaking to the member. Service representatives greet members by name and can immediately start helping without having members reiterate their questions. Having this knowledge of the member’s information gives USAA the ability to create an experience that demonstrates to the member that USAA knows them.

USAA works to be aware of its members’ daily lives. Personalized customer service drives efforts to increase the service efficiency a member gets. Members no longer have to wait to speak with someone, nor are they bombarded with unnecessary questions. The assistance they need is at their fingertips.
USAA’s dedication to providing legendary service has allowed them to provide highly personalized support over multiple mediums. Sharing context about members across channels is enhancing the member experience. Members save time and get the assistance they need when they need it. USAA serves its members well by providing a better experience based on their personal needs. As an innovative leader in technology within banking, it will be exciting to see where USAA decides to explore next within the technology landscape.

27 Nov
2015

Omnichannel Today: Week of November 30th

Omnichannel Today – Black Friday Edition

Happy Thanksgiving from NectarOM! As we gear up for the eCommerce holidays of Black Friday and Cyber Monday these are the latest news articles we’ve been paying attention to:

JC Penney’s Retail Reinvention

Unlike Nordstrom’s and Macy’s, JCP is on course to exceed holiday expectations during a season where eCommerce and digital platforms are taking away business from retail. The secret, as CEO Marvin Ellison puts it, is finding the balance between the “art” and “science” of retail. JC Penney is taking a completely different approach to their in-store experience, developing attractive new features such as store-within-a-store kiosks for both younger shoppers and the upcoming cohort Millennial-age parents. Next up for the department store? Focusing on the science side of things by making improvements to their eCommerce, supply chain, and data processing abilities.

Amazon’s ingenious scheme to undermine Black Friday

Black Friday and its younger sibling Cyber Monday are a major source of income for the retail industry every year. Since this last Friday, web giant Amazon has taken advantage of the holiday shopping fervor to entice customers with constantly updated deals and featured items, hoping to sway buyers that won’t miss the authentic “Black Friday Experience” of elbowing through crowded stores. That said, certain stores such as Best Buy and Target have responded to Amazon by making their in-store discounts apply to their eCommerce platforms as well.

Facebook Says Nearly One Third of Online Shopping Transactions Are On Mobile Devices

New data from Facebook suggests that its users are becoming much more comfortable with using mobile devices to shop and make purchases. The social media titan expects a 30% increase in the percentage of users who buy on mobile by the end of the fourth quarter. Facebook researchers also observed that about 45% of all shopping occasions involve mobile devices in some fashion, such as during product research that results in a purchase on a desktop.

Retail enters third phase of digital evolution: ‘Emotional’ eCommerce

A new article from the Financial Times discusses how modern shoppers expect brands to develop a relationship with them over social media and other digital platforms. The thought leaders interviewed point to the success of apps like Instagram, Etsy, and Olapic, who offer businesses the ability to showcase their “human side” to potential customers by using memes, shareable posts, and conversation starters to promote fan engagement over social media.

When Big Data Analytics Hurts Innovation

Making use of Big Data is a staple of every digital marketer’s playbook, especially those in the retail sector who will use it to measure such things as transaction and customer loyalty. There is a lot of potential to be found in Big Data analytics, but it’s lost when retailers grow too comfortable with a “proven” approach and fail to keep testing and discovering new viable marketing strategies. Ultimately, realizing the limits of Big Data analytics and becoming comfortable with experimentation is the key to making sure your business stays in touch with the demands of its environment and its customers.

Analytics are Impressive, but Incomplete

Current trade promotion optimization (TPO) solutions simply weren’t designed to extract signal from the large volume of noisy data that modern retailers generate, and analytics is still unable to specifically measure the effect of qualitative factors like ad design, layout, and wording on ROI. This means that, for better or worse, the current limitations of our technology mean that Big Data can only give us a partial look at what worked and what did not.

Don’t get me wrong. Data analytics provides marketers with an incredible degree of insight, but we must remember to use it as a tool with defined goals and a good understanding of what it can and cannot accomplish.

For instance, analytics is much better at explaining the past than predicting the future. This means that you can’t predict with certainty the effect that a certain kind of discount, pricing structure, or cross-merchandising tactic will play out: you need to run an experiment. This can be scary, but an unwillingness to try new things could leave your business wading in the shallow end of success, perhaps losing very little but not making much either.

Offer Innovation: A Better Way

As a rule, the best way to experiment in this field is to maximize your exposure to positive (beneficial) risks while minimizing your exposure to negative risk. The best way to do so in the omnichannel age is to experiment with offer innovation, a series of micro-tests that you can use to analyze the small-scale performance of diverse offers and messages across channels. Instead of shifting your entire marketing campaign in one great, lurching motion, you’ll be testing many ideas at once and keeping an eye on any promising developments without risking the bulk of your business. The gamble you’re taking is absorbing little failures (i.e., a particular method falls flat) in hopes that you’ll stumble upon a new, reliable way to connect with a certain kind of customer.

Ironically, realizing the limitations of data analytics will help you make better decisions and make more calculated risks. Don’t be afraid to make small mistakes, especially when there’s a large potential payoff at the end.

Tag: innovation