What is Customer Analytics? How Financial Services Use It and Why It Matters

In this post, we will cover:

• What is Customer Analytics?
• How Do Banks and Financial Institutions Use Customer Analytics?
• Benefits of Customer Analytics 
• Leveraging MX Customer Analytics

What is Customer Analytics?

Customer analytics is using data to understand the composition, needs, and satisfaction of the customer. Customer analytics tools often include technology that enables organizations to easily create customer personas and segment customers into groups based on demographics, behaviors, or other factors. 

Within the financial services industry, customer analytics leverages consumer-permissioned financial data — such as account information, spending behaviors, transaction history, etc. — to better understand consumers and create more targeted, personalized services, products, and offers. 

In today’s digital-first, hyper-personalized world, consumers expect their financial providers to know them — MX’s latest consumer research found that more than half of U.S. consumers (54%) expect this. Financial institutions and fintechs have a wealth of data about their consumers. However, data on its own is just data. 

Customer analytics enables financial institutions and other financial providers to derive insights from this data so that they can better meet consumer needs and drive better outcomes. And, most consumers (54%) want financial providers to leverage that data to personalize their experience.

How Do Banks and Financial Institutions Use Customer Analytics?

Banks, credit unions and other financial institutions leverage customer analytics in a number of ways to drive results for both their customers and businesses. This includes everything from acquiring new customers and driving engagement to uncovering new growth opportunities. Let’s look at each of these areas in more detail. 

Acquire More Customers

New customer acquisition is a critical component to any bank’s success. Customer analytics helps financial institutions better identify and acquire new customers with insights into who their customers are and what they want. This enables banks to develop better products and services that are informed by customer needs and behaviors. Customer analytics also enables financial providers to better categorize, segment, and target current and potential customers based on key factors so that they can reach them with the right message and the right products. 

Increase Engagement and Adoption

Reducing churn and fostering deeper customer engagement is imperative for sustained growth. By leveraging actionable financial data intelligence, financial providers can deliver hyper-personalized experiences that resonate with the unique preferences and behaviors of each customer. 

Drive Incremental Growth

By analyzing held, aggregated, and discovered account data, financial providers can surface areas of opportunity to expand and engage with customers in new ways. 

Benefits of Customer Analytics

With customer analytics, organizations can gain a better understanding of their customers’ financial lives, including things like spending behaviors, primary and held-away deposit accounts, estimated monthly income, and product adoption. With this financial data intelligence, the benefits can be significant.

Here are the top 5 benefits of leveraging customer analytics:

1. Increase engagement by delivering the right message at the right time in each customer’s journey
2. Predict and prevent customer churn with a better understanding of trends and behaviors
3. Increase marketing effectiveness by using data to curate an appropriate and timely campaign
4. Uncover cross-sell opportunities and gain share of wallet
5. Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty with personalized experiences that meet consumers where they are

Leveraging MX Customer Analytics

With MX’s Customer Analytics, organizations can gain a more comprehensive picture of their customers’ financial lives — allowing them to improve customer segmentation and marketing strategies. It combines consumer-permissioned and enhanced transaction data into a centralized, comprehensive set of intelligent models, dashboards, and analytics tools all of which can be easily embedded into marketing automation platforms and CRMs.

Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, Customer Analytics helps financial services providers:

• Gain a more comprehensive picture of their customers’ financial lives with a centralized, comprehensive set of intelligent models, dashboards, and analytics tools all of which can be easily embedded into marketing automation platforms and CRMs
• Easily uncover cross-sell opportunities and target consumers based on personas, product adoption, and financial behaviors
• Engage consumers and achieve a higher ROI on marketing spend and campaigns with better audience segmentation that is easily exported into their preferred marketing, social media, CRM platforms, and data warehouses
• Identify external accounts, balances, and interest rates for credit cards, mortgages, and  loans to inform product roadmaps and improve targeted messages 
• Predict and prevent churn based on analysis of de-identified data, trends, and strategic recommendations 
• Embed financial insights and relevant offers that meet consumers where they are with personalized money experiences – enhanced by MX's Financial Wellness and Insights tools