Podcast November 4, 2021

How customer data platforms make banking more human

Who hasn’t received an email from their bank for an account that’s completely irrelevant?

It makes you feel like your bank doesn’t care about you one bit, right?

Banks have all the data they could ask for to understand their customers, but, clearly, most of them don’t know how to use it.

But customer data platforms are changing that.

Today’s guest, Izabella Gabowicz, COO at Sensibill, is someone helping lead the CDP revolution. She joins the show to share why CDPs are such an exciting tool for leveraging data to deliver better customer experiences.

In this episode, we discuss:

  • How CDPs make banking more human
  • How to Use a CDP to marketing noise into highly targeted marketing
  • How CDPs foster empathy

The State of Data

Banks have no shortage of data. The data is usually housed in a variety of different systems, places, or databases. And it’s often difficult for the banks to actually make sense of all of the data that they have.

Think about opening a 2,000 piece puzzle. If you just dump all the pieces out on the table, it’s overwhelming. You don’t know where to start. So you do what everybody does: you start flipping all the pieces over. You’re not even putting the puzzle together yet, you’re just trying to get a handle on WHAT sort of task you have in front of you.

 “Banks have no shortage of data. But it’s often difficult from an infrastructure perspective to be able to make any changes to those to integrate other systems that sales teams, marketing teams, operations teams might have.”— Izabella Gabowicz

The same is true for data. And this is why customer data platforms are becoming all the rage across the industry because you’re able to get packaged software that is creating a persistent database for customers. You have a single place where everything about a particular customer is stored uniformly. And it makes it easy for other systems within your organization to be able to integrate and get the needed data.

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP?)

Like was previously mentioned, banks have a seemingly unlimited amount of data for their clients. But it’s knowing what to do with that data, how to store it, how to manage it, and how to utilize it, that’s key.

A customer data platform is simply that: a single piece of packaged software that creates a persistent database for customers. It’s going to bring all the data together for a customer, and allow you to interact with your customers in the most meaningful way. And for the purposes of this interview, there are two different types of CDPs.

  1. The Horizontal CDP

The horizontal CDP is going to do this data analysis across the industry. Whether it’s media, retail, insurance, or banking, it’s going to bring together these different pieces of data, these blobs of data, and group them all together in one spot.

“If financial institutions don’t take steps now towards a personalized experience, they’re certainly going to see themselves transformed — but not necessarily in a positive way”— Izabella Gabowicz

But understanding WHAT the blobs of data mean isn’t what a horizontal CDP will do.

  1. The Vertical CDP

A vertical CDP is going to be industry-specific. Say your customer spends $450 at a home improvement store. Your CDP may be able to take a deeper dive at the line time data on the receipts, and you notice that your customer is spending large amounts of money on bathroom renovation supplies.

This would allow you to tailor your interactions with your customer. Maybe they need a home equity line of credit? Maybe they need some refinance advice?

These are the things that a good CDP can do for you. If you are struggling with the amount of data you have, how to use that data, and how to best serve your customers, make sure and check out the entire interview with Izabella, and look into a good CDP solution.

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Until next time!

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