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This post sees us kicking off another brand new series – industry-specific KPIs! Our own experience of working with many different organisations, each focused on a very specialised and differentiated market, has demonstrated that the indicators that are crucial for one company may be completely irrelevant for another. Therefore we would like to share some of the industry-specific knowledge we have gained to help you get started defining your dashboards.
We would like to start by contemplating the Finance industry and focus on a specific branch, Banking, while considering its most powerful current trends: multichannel marketing and Big Data.
Nowadays modern technologies are disrupting every traditional industry, and Banking is not an exception. At Sweetspot we have always highlighted the importance of integrating multiple channels in order to achieve a consistent brand message and obtain a holistic view of the customer journey. Similarly, relying on external data from various sources, that may initially seem unrelated, has the potential of leading to unexpected insights and thus creative decisions and bigger profits. For these reasons, banks have to adapt to the new digital environment and carefully devise compelling KPIs in order to keep up with the constantly evolving competitive marketplace.
To thoroughly understand the customer journey and address their disparate needs, we recommend that banks monitor the following KPIs:
Understanding the nature of your clients’ interaction with your bank will help you manage human and financial resources appropriately. According to a recent research conducted by The Bank of America, 90% of respondents claim that they use online banking, while only 23% of them undertake banking transactions at a bank branch. This not only means that more and more users feel competent and skilled enough to manage their accounts and operations, but also that they rely on their bank’s digital facilities to satisfy their daily needs. Therefore, it is crucial to devise an efficient and user-friendly online banking platform in order to meet clients’ expectations. However, on site operations should not be forgotten either, since 84% of the respondents still admit to having visited a bank branch within the past six months. This evidence suggests that due to the variability of clients’ behaviour it would come highly recommended to monitor it via the discussed KPI.
This KPI originates from the widely accepted general understanding across different industries that the customer’s needs and motivations have to be measured together, regardless of which channel they are coming from. In Banking this idea is especially pertinent. Although many users feel confident enough to use online platforms as mentioned earlier, they do seek advisors’ help for some serious decisions, such as mortgages, pension funds and the like. It is common for individuals to do some independent online research, and then turn to the branch when they feel they have gained a certain level of competence and will better understand the advice given. Banks, in turn, will benefit from monitoring what sections of their websites clients are examining, since employees on site will then be armed with the most up-to-date and personalised information in order to be able to offer the clients the most relevant services.
Mobile banking is a channel that deserves to be mentioned separately. According to the Bank of America survey, 62% of the respondents have at least tried mobile banking, and 6 in 10 of them confess to consistently using mobile banking to check deposits. This means that banks have to pay special attention to developing their mobile applications, since people tend to spend more time browsing from their smartphones than their laptops or PCs. Moreover, it is useful to measure the aims users pursue when accessing mobile banking (e.g. checking account balances and statements, paying bills, transferring funds, etc) and draw on this data when to improve the mobile apps’ functionalities.
While the three KPIs analysed above deal with existing clients, we do not want to leave new clients unattended. Given the difficulty of monitoring their behaviour across channels due to the initial lack of information about them, we recommend turning to Big Data in search of valuable insights. For example, when devising campaigns for lead generation it is extremely useful to rely on seasonal patterns, i.e. external events that are not directly related to your bank’s activity. You can identify certain patterns in them: for instance, credits tend to rise before summer months since people might need extra funding to go on holidays, while pension funds are opened more frequently in the last quarter. Measuring this data to consequently apply it to your campaigns will undoubtedly boost your ROI and lead to an increase in new clients, since your bank will be prepared to attend their needs in the most timely manner.
In this overview we hope to have provided you with some relevant KPIs to measure in Banking industry, with a constant focus on successfully surviving in the contemporary data- and technology-informed marketplace. However, we wouldn’t want you to forget about the uniqueness of each company’s needs and possibilities, which makes it impossible to provide a uniform solution for all of them. For this reason, we would love to hear from you:
What are the KPIs that you find to be crucial for your banking activity?
Marketing and Communications Executive, focused on content, Sweetspot Academy and inbound marketing. BA in English, University of Oviedo, Spain.
Not Another Dashboard.
Add a comment
Tania Asa
Thanks a lot for your feedback, Sergio.
I completely agree with you, first three metrics rely quite heavily on our customers’ maturity. If their “self-sufficiency” is not high enough, there is definitely no use in measuring these KPIs. I would say that both indicators you are proposing here second the main idea of this post, namely, the importance of our clients’ online engagement.
Thanks for the suggested KPIs, they are definitely interesting and not only for the Banking area. Perhaps a further blog post could uncover their relevance!
Published on , 12:50 pm
Sergio Maldonado
Many thanks, Tania
I guess the one thing that I am missing here is a basic intro to the KPIs for which a break-down is provided above. So, just to complete it if I get it right:
– Average Maturity Score (for all users) could be the basic starting point for Onsite vs Offsite and ROPO. And even for Mobile Banking Usage. This, of course, if we consider a client more “mature” whenever they result in lower costs for us (i.e.. higher level of self-management)
– Total Volume of Online Transactions would be giving us a good idea of the level of activity we get and how it grows over time. It is here that the Seasonal Fluctuation will also come very handy to explain the patterns and their correlation to seasonal events.
Other KPIs I would consider in Banking are: Overall Satisfaction (there are many indexes available out there, including NPS), Task Completion Rate (more tactical, but useful to improve the actual performance of self-managed services through Errors by Task or Assistance Level by Task breakdowns).
All in all enough for yet another blog post! 🙂
Published on , 8:41 pm