Exploring the Digital Nudges for Customer Engagement with Kevin from Xtremepush

The Fintech revolution is making automation across multiple touchpoints a critical part of an integrated customer experience. While Fintechs are innovating on digital engagement strategies that are truly optimized, responsive and user-friendly, we caught up with Kevin Collins, CTO at Xtremepush, who is redefining automated customer engagements with a multi-channel engagement and experience platform.  

1.  How do you think the space for automated customer engagement in banking has evolved? Can you recommend 3 best practices for banks to follow when it comes to effectively engaging with customers?

The space in Banking has evolved similar to other spaces like eCommerce. Any organization that’s doing customer messaging and marketing over time would have built up silos. The big banks for instance would have 5-6 different SMS vendors and the big trend for automation is to start automating whether you’re using solutions like ours or you add some channels, use APIs for transactional type of automated messages or orchestration tools for your website. The big move has been to break down the silos.

In terms of 3 best practices:

• To understand your customer you need to get a unified view of the customer to start messaging and automating
• Second, bring all your channels together in a multi-channel approach, helping you select what’s the best channel for a given customer
• Third, always be a positive influence to your customer and don’t bombard your customers with irrelevant content. Timely and relevant is the key.

2.  How about contextual notifications given that you’re in the push notification space?

We’re marketing 12 platforms so we have a number of trends from them, a data management one to understand the customer, to get the context you have the App layer, the customer profile data from the back-end APIs, software development kits on mobile and web so that we can understand behaviour. As an instance, in case you have an issue registering with the mobile banking app, a real-time event is popped up in the form of a self-help page that explains what you need to do to get registered. We can understand the context by taking in event feeds.

On the mobile, we have our own location services capability on the mobile, so that we can get contextual relevance in terms of location. Relevant messages can be sent when you’re in the branch, a partner location and so forth. We work with 3rd party sources like Google Analytics for website and behavioural data.

3. What does Xtremepush do and how do you see the product to be a game changer in the market today?

We’re a MacinCloud platform, there are 3 core elements of that:

• First is data management which helps you understand the customer
• Second is our multi-campaign management capability that helps you engage with customers across channels like email, SMS, push notifications on app and web, pop up messages on a website, social messengers like Facebook, WhatsApp among others. We also have web app capability that can send an arbitrary action to another system.
• The third is our orchestration tool that maps the customer journey and all the relevant communication touchpoints.

Our USP that brings it all together is our incredibly rich cloud mapping capability. We do not make our customers stand up all that capability in one goal. One unique challenge in the banking space is siloed communication point solutions, say, 5-6 SMS vendors, a few email vendors, push notifications with another supplier. We are going to be agile in deploying all the rich MacinCloud capabilities we have. We orchestrate your communications from one place in an agile manner.

4.   According to you, what are the key areas in an online banking journey where automated customer engagement can be used?

There are three areas I’d like to look at:

• Customer Onboarding: Initial registration for activation and then the welcoming phase of customer activation. One example could be the automated consolidated statements in mobile banking once a customer has onboarded.
• Customer Transactions: Once the customer has become familiar with your interface, the ease of seamless navigation to transfer money to friends and family for automated payments.  
• Personalized Marketing: Automatically tracking the behavior of people for personal loan application features or when they drop off to (re)engage with them for contextualized engagement. We’ve helped banks double the loan applications in a year.

5.  What is the best use case you have ever come across for proximity-based customer engagement? And how can this be a game changer for banks?

I’m a big Sports Fan, so I believe in engagement in stadiums and sports arenas J Over the years, we’ve worked with sports teams and banks that sponsor sports teams. We can target people who are fans of music or sport at the arena with messages that resonate with them. Whether it’s an offer to meet players after the game or an upgrade to a VIP box; such engagements are really powerful and well-received.

Such location-based campaigns can be a game changer for banks. Customer propensity and intuitive behaviours can be realized from transactions made at locations that would otherwise be hard to procure. Unlike Reward Points that expire, location data can make it relevant for the customer for heightened engagements. When the customer is in market, short term finance is one use case that can have a high utility in a customer’s journey.

6.  How has your journey been with Temenos considering that Xtremepush is now on Temenos Marketplace?

It’s been an exciting journey: we’ve done two Innovation Jams, started winning the London Jam and the TCF at Lisbon. We also won the Dublin Jam in our hometown this year. In the Temenos Marketplace we have our first share of clients and are really looking forward to the upcoming Temenos events! We are looking forward to growing Xtremepush in the banking sector.

7.  What are your predictions for digital customer channels in 2019 for Banking?

In 2019, we are going to see the continuing unlocking of financial data enabled by the PSD2 Banking initiative. Voice will start to emerge as a legitimate channel to do your banking. Although it has some limitations, it’s really gaining traction.  Digital payments would make strides in social messaging channels. WhatsApp is emerging with its semi-private APIs and is definitely a space to watch out for in 2019!