It is the age of 'personalized customer experiences'. Businesses all over the world are trying hard to custom-create customer experience, and banks are no different.
Yes, there is immense effort put into making your banking experience 'personalized'. Banks want to give you that 'wow' experience every time you login to your online account. But what is the extent of personalization? Would you like your banking page to
reflect personal preferences and aspects of your life? Well, that day might not be too far away. Experiments with perceptive media are already a hot trend in other fields. How it works is, perceptive media adapts itself based on available information of the
user. I recently read about BBC's efforts to bring perceptive media to television sets. What it could mean is, when you see a photo frame in a scene on TV, it just might be your picture! Or the background music you hear on a scene might change to suit your
tastes!
Now imagine your banking portal providing you that kind of an experience. Say,
- The advertisement for a home loan on the bank's page shows a picture of your family
- You take a holiday to the Caribbean and your banking page displays a beach theme
- The page 'remembers' whatever you have accessed and uses it to tailor the display. Remember how tiresome it is to see the same pop-ups or messages again and again? Well, what if the page could remember that you have seen a pop-up in the past and decides
not to show the same pop-up again but shows you an entirely new one.
- How about if the portal knows your level of knowledge about a product and talks to you intelligently? So that if you have taken a home loan previously, it doesn't bother telling you basic things about another home loan, but instead tells you how it is
different from what you currently have.
- The portal continuously 'learns' your preferences over time and changes the widgets accordingly, so that you are logging into a page that is slowly evolving from just a banking page to a one stop shop for all your preferred widgets and apps.
And these changes may not even be sudden - the portal would bring in subtle changes according to all the information available out there about you. Would that make you feel happy that your bank knows you well or would you feel like it is unnecessary? Well,
like it or not, things are likely to get more and more interesting on your banking portal.