Financial Services

Webinar Recap:
Wake Up! The Rising Challenge of Re-Engaging Dormant Customers

Moderated by former bank CMO and financial services marketing executive, Tricia Gabberty, Justin Dunn, CMO at WSFS Bank and Steve Gillin, President at Relay Network, engaged in a lively discussion on an often-overlooked facet of the current banking reality – dormant customers. To watch the full recording, click on the image below.

As digital engagement becomes increasingly integral to the success of all businesses in the 21st century, the cost of disengagement in banking is particularly rampant. According to Cornerstone, 66% of customers at banks are disengaged. Justin Dunn, CMO at WSFS Bank, contextualizes this staggering figure by sharing that “with more and more customers feeling comfortable moving money around digitally, the ability to just transfer funds out and create that silent attrition has never been greater.”

Due to the prevalence of these digital channels, customer engagement has lost its personal touch. Digital now positions customer-bank interactions to be purely transactional rather than relational in nature. Relay Network’s President Steve Gillin adds that in the new digital reality “you lose the ability to have the core dialogue with your costumer, what’s going on in their life, how’s their family; it’s all about, ‘Hey, did you want this product?’ Buy this product, self-serve here.’”

While building relationships with new customers is paramount, a Relay-commissioned Forrester survey found that 79% of banking and credit union CX leaders find re-engaging dormant customers to be more difficult than engaging new ones. In this webinar, Justin Dunn and Steve Gillin discuss what banks can do to re-engage customers on the cusp of churn and build customer relationships that promote lifetime value, loyalty, and retention. We share the most salient highlights of their conversation in this blog post.

Content is Key for Re-Engagement

Financial institutions are experiencing a drastic shift in consumer behavior due to the rise of digital platforms in the banking industry. Justin Dunn gave insight into how WSFS Bank is engaging customers on a digital scale, especially post-pandemic. One of the primary goals of Dunn and his team was to increase the amount and type of content for consumers and more importantly, meet them where they are. As fewer customers search for in-person interaction, WSFS has made strides towards connecting with them through tools like Relay’s Customer Feed, as well as more traditional avenues such as email and direct mail.

Relay’s Customer Feed offers a way to bridge the gap between customer and bank and move from a transactional relationship to a more personal one. By leveraging digital, 1:1 feed technology, Relay allows customers to interact with content similar to how they would on social feeds such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The power of feed technology completely transforms the way companies interact with customers and helps support initiatives like the one at WSFS Bank to enable meaningful digital customer engagement.

Steve Gillin: Too often, businesses in our life are just trying to hammer us with the revenue, but the relationship deepening, that’s where we see the biggest differentiation between taking a disengaged customer and driving engagement.

Justin Dunn: It’s not all about product offers and cross-sell, it’s about content and providing [customers] with relevant information. The reality is the banking industry is a commodity. Applying for mortgage is a transaction, opening a checking account is a transaction, but what types of experiences we create after those transactions, that is what will help prevent customers from getting disengaged in the first place.

Re-Engagement is a Worthwhile Investment 

Another key topic discussed in the webinar was the resources and strategic decisions necessary to ensure successful re-engagement initiatives. Re-engagement is a significant undertaking, but segmenting it into phases and leveraging efficiency in each campaign, can have a monumental impact. Justin Dunn and Steve Gillin share their thoughts on the topic below:

Justin Dunn: At the end of the day, these are investments and not expenses — investments deliver return. With each one of these, it’s about identifying the revenue that you can generate from leveraging these tools and how they can be pieced together to create a better customer experience and, ultimately, deeper relationships that would generate more revenue.

Steve Gillin: One of the nice things about the Relay platform is, as you think about the experiences that our clients will push across our feed, they’re all tied to the core business outcomes that matter most to that company. In financial services, it always starts with revenue, then cost reduction, and then goes to relationship deepening and customer satisfaction. Each experience that goes out is tied to one of those key outcomes.

We are so grateful for the opportunity to have discussed such an important topic with market leaders looking to change the landscape of digital experiences for customers in the financial services industry. These ideas were among many that were discussed during the webinar, so if you are interested in listening to the entirety of the conversation, you can access the full recording by clicking here.