Financial Services

Webinar Recap: Executives from Bank of America, TD Bank, and Wells Fargo Talk Meaningful Engagement with Relay CEO, Matt Gillin

Watch the full webinar below

Over the course of the year, Relay has hosted quite a few webinars where panelists have shared many interesting and important insights around customer experience and engagement. As we approach our upcoming CBA Webinar, “Humanizing the Digital Experience: Successes and Insights from a Career Innovator”, featuring John Thomas, Chief Innovation Officer at Relay Network and former Innovation Executive at TD Bank, we wanted to share some highlights from one of our discussions as a sneak peak of what you can expect out of the conversation on September 27.

During our webinar, “How Can Banks Drive More Meaningful Engagement? Bridging the Human-Digital Divide”, in partnership with the Financial Times, Relay’s CEO, Matt Gillin, spoke with executives from Bank of America, TD Bank, and Wells Fargo around the increased usage of digital tools to engage banking customers beyond their daily transactions and how they are using those tools to build relationships and foster trust with customers. Some of the key takeaways from the conversation can be found below:

Kicking off the conversation, Matt Gillin acknowledged that “Not all engagement is created equal. So, one of the things that you’re really seeing in the space is banks and all businesses are focused on the rate of engagement and the type of engagement.”

How are some of these banks looking at and measuring engagement today?

From Rejeesh Ramachandran, SVP, Head of Strategic Business Architecture & Customer Insights at TD Bank:

“For us, customer engagement is about having meaningful interactions with our customers. That’s what it is. We have put the customer at the center and then we intend to understand them holistically instead of just looking at them as individual data points.”

From Ashley Ross, SVP, Consumer and Small Business Client Care Executive at Bank of America:

“We have 54 million digital users, but we need to go beyond that and really look at the frequency of their engagement, so we track that as well. But then, it’s really about the quality of the engagement and what the clients are doing, and we look at that in a variety of ways.”

What are strategies that these banks are implementing to drive more meaningful engagement?

Educational vs. Transactional Content

From Matt Gillin, Relay Network:

“Depending on where you are in your life stage banks are very good at personalizing and delivering guidance, it just has to get out at a much higher rate. So being able to guide customers at these key moments in life is a huge opportunity.”

From Ashley Ross, Bank of America:

“Clients are starved for education, but one of the components that we have in our financial health is all about simplifying the finances, it’s about managing their money, it’s about leveraging the experts in our specialists, in our branches. It’s about building knowledge.”

Utilizing Data and AI to Create Personal Experiences

From Matt Gillin, Relay Network:

“The only real proactive engagement that’s happening today with customers, is email to a portal or in-app notification. So, the first big opportunity for using AI and all this data is to proactively use that data to know when is the right time to reach out to customers.”

From Ashley Ross, Bank of America:

“The client expectations on personalization have just ramped up through the digital age. And I think that’s a good way to kind of impress and keep pace with our client in the digital space, is just really focusing on that personalization, not as a group of people, but as you specifically, our client, what we think you need.”

With all this focus on engagement, what value have these banks seen from their engagement initiatives?

Meaningful Engagement Drives Important Business Outcomes

From Brad Strothkamp, SVP, Customer Experience Intelligence at Wells Fargo:

“We know that when customers are more engaged and the level of engagement goes up in digital, the outcomes that really matter to both the customer and the bank are increased, whether that be reducing attrition, increasing likelihood to consider for additional products or driving online or overall satisfaction or NPS, these all come from that engagement.”

From Rejeesh Ramachandran, TD Bank:

“It should be very clear to everybody now that the more engaged somebody is, the better it is for both themselves, as well as the business that they’re interacting with — it’s no longer a secret at this point.”

Beyond these soundbites, our panelists shared many other insights and ideas to inspire customer engagement and experience in the financial services sector. If you are interested in hearing the entirety of the conversation, click here.

If you are looking to gain more insight on the topic, join us for our upcoming webinar in partnership with CBA, “Humanizing the Digital Experience: Successes and Insights from a Career Innovator” at 1:00 pm EST on Tuesday, September 27 by registering here.