Profile-Based Market Segmentation Approach to Personalization

Summary

In-depth personalization experiences rely on relevant user data, unifying their engagement channels, and creating segments to build first-person perspectives on interactions that are mutually relevant and beneficial for investors and institutions.

• The personalization strategy of any organization relies on the effective use of data to deliver a reinvented customer experience
• Single client profile is based on a data structure involving an aggregation of user behaviors and attributes and is a key component in formulating a scalable data strategy for personalization
• Leveraging a comprehensive customer profile and segmentation methods in a layered approach can help wealth managers understand the changing attitudes toward their client’s decision-making and influence customer experience strategies

The Battle for Customer Loyalty

The massive growth of young affluent investors poses a unique opportunity to serve traditionally underserved markets who demand traditionally more complex financial products compared to the well-defined set of offerings established by the baby boomer clients, including better wealth advice, access to greater personalized services, and transparent pricing structures and fees. The increased sophistication of the new generation of clients is evident in the types of products sought, the level of risk tolerance, and the way in which clients expect to view, monitor, and manage the performance of these products. With more income and distinct ways in which they approach managing their wealth, institutions will need to offer new technologies, new investment opportunities, and a new crop of financial advisors.

Advisors must have the right tools and skills to orchestrate complex processes and create a consistent and streamlined experience for their clients. Acknowledging that narrative is an important part of customer connection and will enable firms to embrace and incorporate client behavioral analysis into their personalization strategies and improve customer experience across the wealth journey.

Personalization for the Next Generation

The advent of a new generation of fintech companies has demonstrated how agile business models and deep customer-centric engagements could overshadow legacy firms and win access to a substantially new market segment in a cost-effective manner and with burgeoning customer loyalty. Emerging innovative technologies, coupled with new data sets and advanced data analytic practices, are presenting financial institutions with predictive and dynamic insights, notably through unified client profiles, refined segmentation methods, and enterprise-wide adoption of modernized infrastructure and data-driven organizational practices. In particular, the digital transformation of behavioral analysis has presented unique opportunities to better understand and engage more meaningfully with clients. The assessment of market segments uses data-driven pattern recognition to obtain a deeper knowledge of customer-level insights and their affinity toward certain products, service models, and investment behavior.

To implement personalization, the segmentation framework is based on a data structure involving an aggregation of user behaviors and attributes, constructed into a single view of the customer profile to activate a systematic and scalable method of hyper-customized offerings across the customer wealth journey.

A 360-Degree View of Customer Data

Value-based customer experience has clear linkages to aggregate and real time customer data from across all touchpoints in the customer journey. Single customer view aggregates client activity with their preferences to create a holistic picture of an individual’s wealth need, translating their behavior into personalized recommendations

• Single Client Profile: Collecting and combining core customer-centric data points in a single view enables wealth managers to efficiently deliver personalized customer experiences using data products that richly define strategic audience segmentation subgroups. Data platforms collect and structure data in real time from a variety of touchpoints along the customer journey, then aggregate and organize customer data to create a single client view before persisting the customer profile to other software, systems, and data ecosystems. By unifying first party, and in some cases third party, data sources to create a single source of truth and building a comprehensive 360-degree view of the client, financial advisors are optimally equipped to manage customer relations by leveraging their best and most actionable data sets. Key information about the client’s personal information, account and financial holdings, social relationships, and investment portfolio will help identify customers in each segment, measure their characteristics, and activate tangible customer segments.

By establishing a comprehensive customer profile and leveraging segmentation methods in a layered approach towards looking to data to group clients based on similar attributes and behaviors, wealth managers can understand the changing attitudes toward decision-making. This will therefore maximize the effectiveness of meaningful engagement and customer experience. The foundation to superior customer experience is rooted in understanding the customer as an individual being with unique needs and preferences.

Takeaway

The maturity of personalization efforts—as seen with sophisticated data sets in customer-centric data strategies—are enabling smarter decision-making practices and refined growth strategies meant not just to create or extend revenue streams but to remain competitive by increasing internal efficiency and to better understand their clients. Businesses should highlight the unique data sets from each step of the customer experience continuum, whether through prospecting, client onboarding, financial planning, and investment management. These strategies will guide how and why data is captured and aggregated and, as a result, help to identify opportunities and highlight ways to integrate personalization efforts.