Tag: customer journey

A data-driven customer experience certainly has a nice ring, but can your organization deliver on the promise? What we're really getting at is whether you can provide convenience and personalization throughout the customer journey. Using data to personalize the customer journey About half of consumers say personalization is the most important aspect of their online experience. Forward-thinking lenders know this and are working to implement digital transformations, with 87 percent of business leaders stating that digital acceleration has made them more reliant on quality data and insights. For many organizations, lack of data isn't the issue — it's collecting, cleaning and organizing this data. This is especially difficult if your departments are siloed or if you're looking to incorporate external data. What's more, you would need the capabilities to analyze and execute the data if you want to gain meaningful insights and results. LEARN: Infographic: Automated Loan Underwriting Journey Taking a closer look at two important parts of the customer journey, here's how the right data can help you deliver an exceptional user experience. Prescreening To grow your business, you want to identify creditworthy consumers who are likely to respond to your credit offers. Conversely, it's important to avoid engaging consumers who aren't seeking credit or may not meet your credit criteria. Some of the external data points you can incorporate into a digital prescreening strategy are: Core demographics: Identify your best customers based on core demographics, such as location, marital status, family size, education and household income. Lifestyle and financial preferences: Understand how consumers spend their time and money. Home and auto loan use: Gain insight into whether someone rents or owns a home, or if they'll likely buy a new or used vehicle in the upcoming months. Optimized credit marketing strategies can also use standard (and custom) attributes and scores, enabling you to segment your list and create more personalized offers. And by combining credit and marketing data, you can gain a more complete picture of consumers to better understand their preferred channels and meet them where they are. CASE STUDY: Clear Mountain Bank used Digital Prescreen with Micronotes to extend pre-approved offers to consumers who met their predetermined criteria. The refinance marketing campaign generated over $1 million in incremental loans in just two months and saved customers an average of $1,615. Originations Once your precise targeting strategy drives qualified consumers to your application, your data-driven experience can offer a low-friction and highly automated originations process. Alternative credit data: Using traditional and alternative credit data* (or expanded FCRA-regulated data), including consumer-permissioned data, allows you to expand your lending universe, offer more favorable terms to a wider pool of applicants and automate approvals without taking on additional risk. Behavioral and device data: Leveraging behavioral and device data, along with database verifications, enables you to passively authenticate applicants and minimize friction. Linked and digital applications: Offering a fully digital and intuitive experience will appeal to many consumers. In fact, 81 percent of consumers think more highly of brands after a positive digital experience that included multiple touchpoints. And if you automate verifications and prefill applications, you can further create a seamless customer experience. READ: White paper: Getting AI-driven decisioning right in financial services Personalization depends on persistent identification The vast majority (91 percent) of businesses think that improving their digital customer journey is very important. And rightly so: By personalizing digital interactions, financial institutions can identify the right prospects, develop better-targeted marketing campaigns and stay competitive in a crowded market. DOWNLOAD: A 5-Step Checklist for Identifying Credit-Active Prospect To do this, you need an identity management platform that enables you to create a single view of your customer based on data streams from multiple sources and platforms. From marketing to account management, you can use this persistent identity to inform your decisions. This way, you can ensure you're delivering relevant interactions and offers to consumers no matter where they are. WATCH: Webinar: Omnichannel Marketing - Think Outside the Mailbox Personalization offers a win-win Although they want personalization, only 33 percent of consumers have high confidence in a business' ability to recognize them repeatedly.4 To meet consumer expectations and remain competitive, you must deliver digital experiences that are relevant, seamless, and cohesive. Experian Consumer View helps you make a good first impression with consumer insights based on credit bureau and modeled data. Enrich your internal data, and use segmentation solutions to further refine your target population and create offers that resonate and appeal. You can then quickly deliver customized and highly targeted campaigns across 190 media destinations. From there, the Experian PowerCurve® Originations Essentials, an automated decisioning engine, can incorporate multiple external and internal data sources to optimize your strategy. *Disclaimer: When we refer to “Alternative Credit Data," this refers to the use of alternative data and its appropriate use in consumer credit lending decisions, as regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Hence, the term “Expanded FCRA Data" may also apply in this instance and both can be used interchangeably.

This post was updated in 2022. Fraud prevention can seem like a moving target. Criminals often shift from one scheme to the next, forcing organizations to play catch up to protect consumers’ identities and funds. But with the right technology, it’s possible to implement a fraud solution that provides protection and enhances the consumer journey. The pandemic fraud boom Government stimulus funds, COVID-19 testing and the loosening of business controls were a boon for criminals and levied an immense cost against businesses and consumers.   Consumer fraud losses rose to $3.3 billion in 2020, up from $1.8 billion in 2019.   The rapid increase in digital activity had two significant impacts. First, it shifted new account applications to the digital channel, where increased anonymity favors fraudsters by creating an environment where identity thieves could hide among the immense volume of applicants and monetize stolen personally identifiable information (PII). Second, it fueled account takeover (ATO) attacks by introducing digital “newbies” with unsophisticated password habits and limited ability to recognize and protect themselves from malware or social engineering, making them easy targets for credential theft. The return of old-school fraud Now that businesses and consumers are growing wise to some of the fraud schemes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, criminals are turning to new avenues, including tried-and-true methods like account opening and ATO fraud. New account fraud is expected to cost U.S. financial institutions $3.5 billion in 2021 alone.   Fraud organizations will take the PII available and match it with automated tools to increase their efficiency and success rates while continuing with phishing and other schemes to gain new information that can fuel further attacks. Building a fraud solution Staying ahead of fraudsters may feel like a losing proposition but equipped with the proper fraud controls, you can enhance the customer experience, increase operational efficiency and protect against developing fraud schemes. With a fraud solution that uses multiple tools in concert, it’s possible to recognize, verify and holistically risk assess most consumers that pass through your portfolio. The right platform — ideally one that can call upon different services to perform each job — will enable your organization to flag suspicious activity, increase insight into large-scale attacks, track risky users and break down traditional internal silos. By coordinating efforts and adding multiple touchpoints to run both in the foreground and background, you can ensure the right friction is applied at the right time without diminishing the end-user experience. In fact, by improving your recognition tools, you can make the experience for recognized, legitimate customers even easier. To learn more about the potential impacts of traditional fraud and how your organization can leverage a fraud prevention solution to achieve your retention and growth goals, read our latest white paper or request a call. Read white paper Schedule a call

Credit scores play a massive role in a consumer’s financial life as they help determine an individual’s creditworthiness. While 62% of consumers are interested in improving their credit scores, a troublingly high percentage are unsure of where to start. What’s more, one in four Americans have no idea how credit scores are even determined. This knowledge gap presents an opportunity for financial institutions to help consumers increase their credit understanding and establish lasting relationships. Some of the benefits of providing credit education to consumers include: Consumer trust and loyalty Today’s consumers are looking for guidance and support on all things credit. Helping consumers navigate their credit reports, improve their credit scores and explore the impacts of various scenarios are all opportunities for financial institutions to meet this demand and foster loyalty. With the knowledge and tools needed to make confident and responsible financial decisions, consumers will continue to trust and look toward the same financial institutions for credit guidance as they navigate their financial journeys. Credit education is especially valuable to younger consumers. As rookies to the credit game, many Gen Zers may find credit to be mysterious, complex and difficult to grasp. Despite these feelings, Gen Zers have shown considerable interest in becoming financially literate. By continuously providing Gen Z consumers with reliable and accessible credit education early on, financial institutions can grow to become their valuable partner, educator and mentor for life. More cross-sell opportunities The more educational resources financial institutions provide their consumers, the more likely they are to pay their credit card bills on time, take out loans and mortgages they can meet and purchase within their buying power, making them prime candidates to approach for additional credit offerings. According to studies conducted by Visa Performance Solutions, consumers respond more to credit offers from institutions they currently have a relationship with than those they don’t. By providing credit education and relevant offers to existing customers, financial institutions can improve satisfaction while increasing their revenue. Enhances brand reputation While credit education allows financial institutions to strengthen their relationships with existing clients, it also gives them an opportunity to expand and acquire new ones. When consumers feel valued and cared for, they are more likely to recommend a business’s products and services to someone else. The more consumers see how much a financial institution invests in their customers’ financial well-being, the more likely they are to convert themselves. Ready to get started? Providing value to consumers is no longer just about offering great products and services; it’s about helping them understand the basics and importance of credit so that achieving their financial goals comes easily. To learn more about how credit education can help deepen customer relationships and drive business growth, visit our Experian Partners Solutions page. Learn more

It’s time for organizations to harness the power artificial intelligence (AI) can bring to digital identity management – quickly and accurately identifying consumers throughout the lifecycle. The rise in crime   The acceleration to digital platforms created a perfect storm of new opportunities for fraudsters. Synthetic identity fraud, stimulus-related fraud, and other types of cybercrime have seen huge upticks within the past year and a half. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission revealed that consumers reported over 360,000 complaints, resulting in more than $580 million in COVID-19-related fraud losses as of October 2021. To protect both themselves and consumers, businesses — especially lenders — will have to find and incorporate new strategies to identify customers, deter fraudsters and mitigate cybercrime. The benefits of AI for digital identity In our latest e-book, we explore the impacts of AI on organizations’ digital identity strategies, including: How changing consumer expectations increased the need for speed The challenges associated with both AI and digital identities The path forward for digital identity and AI How to develop the right strategy Building a solution It’s clear that current digital identity and fraud prevention tools are not enough to stop cybercriminals. To stay ahead of fraudsters and keep consumers happy, businesses need to look to new technologies — ones that can intake and compute large data sets in near-real time for better and faster decisions throughout the customer lifecycle. By using AI, businesses will enjoy a fast and consistent decisioning system that automatically routes questionable identities to additional authentication steps, allowing employees to focus on the riskiest cases and maximizing efficiency. Read our latest e-book to dive into the ways artificial intelligence and digital identity interact, and the benefits a clear identity strategy can have for the entire user journey. Download the e-book

According to Experian’s latest Global Insights Report, 38% of consumers expect to increase their online activity in the next 12 months. The report also found that consumers continue to have high expectations for their online experience, and businesses are re-imagining the customer journey to reflect that need. This January, Experian surveyed 3,000 consumers and 900 businesses to explore the changes in consumer behavior and business strategy pre- and post-COVID-19. As consumers have embraced life online, they’ve continued to emphasize their feelings regarding the importance of protecting their information. More than half of consumers still consider security to be the most important factor in their digital experience – the same experience they have such high expectations of. Business are acting in turn, with more than half investing in fraud detection methods or software to reduce friction in the customer experience. Digital transformation is also highlighting the need to: Manage regulatory compliance Integrate security measures Ensure access to AI models Attract and manage customers Integrate automation solutions Download the report to get all the latest insights into consumer desires and business behaviors, and keep visiting the Insights blog for a deeper dive into US-specific findings. Download report