Growth in financial services is now digital experience-led and legacy players urgently need to both build and communicate a superior digital experience, according to research from Publicis Sapient.

Writing in the October issue of Admap (topic: brand experience), Mike McCann (Senior Strategist at Publicis Sapient) and Neil Dawson (Chief Strategy Officer, Publicis Sapient International) outline findings from a qualitative and quantitative study in the banking sector which sought to develop and assess three composite metrics across brand, and more specifically, customer experience.

In Experience works, and here’s how, they detail these as:

experience stock, looking at memorability of experience, quality and utility, as well as frequency of interaction – whether consumers remember the brand as providing helpful ways of interacting with it across touchpoints;

reputation stock, looking at how much the brand is talked about, consumer sentiment towards the CX, and how this affects behaviour (how much people hear about a brand, and whether the conversation is generally positive or negative); and

brand delta (net user growth), assessing the brand’s ability to attract new users – where customers are using a brand more, and adjusting for customers using a brand less.

Whilst acknowledging the limitations of the study, the authors highlight the role of digital in all three: digital is now not only the normal touchpoint for most age groups but the “primary brand lens” determining perceptions and attitudes towards brands, even among older people.

“Digital experience drives everything,” they report, “building reputation, net user growth, and frequency of usage.” And digital disruptors such as Monzo outperform legacy retail banks on experience, word-of-mouth, and growth rate.

“If you are a legacy player, poor digital experience stock will act as a lag on your marketing efforts,” they warn. And a good offline experience may help with existing customers but does nothing to attract new users.

“Brands with higher digital experience stock appear to intuitively understand that we are in an age where the brand is the experience, and the experience is the brand,” they state.

“This means marketers need a deeper understanding of how experience drives brand value, and how to distinguish between the short and long-term effects of CX investment.”

This issue of Admap on brand experience features 12 articles: WARC subscribers can access a deck which summarises the expert advice from contributors and key considerations on the topic.
Neil Dawson will be talking about the Value of Experience at EFFWEEK on October 15, 2019, London.

Sourced from Admap