In the era of digital transformation, providing a high-quality customer experience is critical to enhance customer relationships, build loyalty and maintain market share.

Personalization paves the way to:

• Increase your return on investment
• Build customer loyalty and boost engagement
• Increase your customer base
• Gain competitive advantage

The path to personalizing your business begins with a collaborative data strategy. In a recent thought leadership paper, Forrester found that “despite big plans for personalization strategies, execution is elusive and siloed.” Furthermore, data becomes outdated more rapidly now than ever. Firms can miss big opportunities to personalize customer experiences if insights are not built from data quickly. With a united approach and by utilizing the vast amount of data already being collected, financial service providers can drive impact even in the early stages. According to Forrester, “even with immature personalization strategies, firms see an almost 6% increase in sales revenue, a 33% increase in customer loyalty and engagement, and an 11% decrease in marketing costs.”

Where companies struggle most

In a recent IBM® webinar, financial services providers shared that among many important challenges they face, personalization takes the lead as their most significant pain point. And though personalization is a top priority and critical for successful customer relationships, many clients face difficulty with adoption.

The insurance industry is often disrupted by ecommerce players who lure away customers from the established players with enticing digital experiences and more efficient claims processing.

Obstacles to personalization may originate with customer data, where regulatory and privacy concerns centering on demographics and account history may constrain banks from expanding personalization efforts. And myriad types of data can amplify difficulties companies face in dealing with large, granular datasets. How can enterprises aggregate so much data in meaningful ways?

A crisp personalization strategy can transform business positioning from a reactive to proactive model by providing tailored experiences to consumers. Across the financial services industry, enterprises face a variety of challenges, including:

• Difficulty collecting and managing data – The struggle to understand how much data to collect and how to safely store that data can hinder business transformation.
• Inability to personalize at scale – Many data science use cases get stuck in the research phase with nearly 80% failing to make their way into production.
• Lack of the right expertise – The absence of high-quality talent may prolong or disrupt the path to implementation.
• Skepticism around trust and transparency – Transparency is essential for building trust with customers.

Overcome these challenges and accelerate time-to-value with tailored personalization use cases

IBM offers industry accelerators built for specific use cases to help you shape a personalized journey for your customers, enabling you to effectively offer the right services at the right time. Each IBM Data and AI Accelerator is a pre-packaged set of assets — designed to work with IBM Cloud Pak® for Data — to help business leaders and data scientists solve specific business problems and drive personalization simultaneously.

With sample data, model-creation notebooks, scripts, a sample application and other offerings, you can kickstart your own implementation with the power of IBM Cloud Pak for Data.

Explore how IBM Data and AI Accelerators can help your business create a more effective personalization strategy. Each accelerator is designed to help address the most familiar personalization challenges financial institutions face.

• Segment customers based on demographics and common behaviors with Customer Segmentation
• Predict future life events to understand customer needs in a deeper way using the Customer Life Event Prediction
• Identify customers at risk for closing their accounts and respond proactively with offers designed to maintain their loyalty with the Customer Attrition Prediction
• Provide the right offers at the right time to strengthen the health of your customer base and drive new business with the Customer Offer Affinity

Ramp up with the right expertise

Industry Accelerators in IBM Cloud Pak for Data provide tools to help you to advance from demonstration to implementation in hours, rather than weeks or even months. Learn how these accelerators can help you expedite your personalization strategy by exploring the new Accelerator Catalog.

For help getting started, let our experts assist you. The IBM Industry Accelerators team will work side by side with your team to co-engineer AI solutions and help your business develop a personalization strategy.

Coming soon! The SME Banking Accelerator is designed to streamline the loan application process, allowing you to analyze loan data, evaluate risk and optimize decision-making with relevant AI predictions.