4 ways actionable insights will benefit your business

7 min read|Published April 08, 2020

In part one of this series we scratched the surface of actionable insights, and what it can help you build. This time, we’re diving deep into the benefits for your business, and showing you how actionable insights is a game changer for your customers.

From engaging more customers, to winning a greater share of their business, the benefits of actionable insights is vast. It brings financial services to life, letting you automate advice in a hyper relevant way, giving your customers a personal coach to help them reach their goals and ultimately, make better financial decisions.

When you can understand each of your customers individually, it’s easier to help them make smarter financial decisions. Providing this level of personal service can be time consuming and costly for businesses, which has previously made it unfeasible. But not anymore.

Actionable insights lets you automate advice and recommendations on a massive scale, giving each customer a highly relevant service that is completely personalised to their needs, goals and behaviour. This is great for your customers, but it also brings big opportunities for your business. Here are a few examples of what it can help you achieve.

1. Engage more customers

The key to increasing engagement through actionable insights is a chain reaction of relevant recommendations, each building on the last to add more value to the advice.

For instance, you can encourage a customer to get into a savings habit, and help them set a relevant and realistic target to reach. Then you can help them with ways to get there. You could analyse their spending habits and suggest that if they spent just 10% less on restaurant visits and saved that money instead, they could hit their goal in one year. A simple yet effective nudge to help them on their way.

The next step could then be to help your customer set budgets for different areas of their spending, and help them to stay on track with updates on how they’re doing throughout the month, motivating them to stay on target.

This is just one example – every customer different, and the beauty of actionable insights is that the advice each customer receives is unique to them.

The important thing is giving these recommendations in the right way at the right time, to inspire action that adds real value. This is only possible when you can analyse customers’ data effectively and understand their priorities and needs.

2. Build trust

By helping customers in their everyday life, you can show them you’ve got their back. By understanding their financial habits, you can give them a heads up to help get them back on track with their spending and savings, supporting them in the right direction.

And when you consistently show you have their backs, and can provide them with valuable support – you deepen the relationship and earn their trust.

There are a couple of different ways you can use actionable insights to show up for them. You can help them keep track of their recurring payments, for instance, flagging when big payments are coming up and helping them make sure the money is there to cover them.

You can also be the bearer of the great news that all their recurring payments for the month are done and they don’t have to factor that into their spending. Or you can encourage them to save a bit more towards their goals if they have a little more money than usual left over.

Help customers get back on track actionable insights

3. Boost sales

Once customers are engaged and trust is built, they tend to be more open to offers of new or improved services.

Rich data allows businesses to target customers intelligently, because they already know which products their customers have, how much they are paying for them, and where the holes in their finances are. Add a good understanding of their income and expenditure to this, and companies can cross sell way more effectively, with highly relevant and personalised offers that people actually want.

For example, when a customer is saving towards a particular goal then it’s a good opportunity to not only help them reach their savings target, but also reach out at the right moment in the savings process to offer additional – and relevant – services.

Let’s say their savings goal is for travelling. When they have almost hit their target you can suggest they apply for a credit card that doesn’t charge a fee for overseas spending, or offer specialist travel insurance for their trip. Or if they are saving to purchase a house or an apartment, you know about it before any other lender, so you can offer them a great rate on a mortgage before they start searching the market.

You can also spot where customers have products with competitors, and if you can offer a better deal, recommend that they switch to your service and save money.

The key is then to make your recommendations as seamless as possible to put into action, with customers being able to move their money or take out a new product in a click or two.

When you make everyday life easier for your customers, with a combination of all that we’ve discussed - engagement, trust and targeted offers - you increasingly become a part of their life. Maybe even something they don’t want to live without. Actionable insights makes it possible to become more relevant to your customers, because you can see a broad picture of their finances, and help to improve them.

This ‘stickiness’ makes it more likely that you will become the go-to-bank for your customers’ financial needs, as over time, you continually offer them relevant advice, so they place more of their business with you, increasing their loyalty to your brand, and your share of wallet.

To find out more about this solution in our actionable insights page, and stay tuned for part three, where we’ll take a closer look at the tech that makes it all possible.

CategoryOpen banking

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