en
Historically low interest rates have encouraged many potential and existing savers to take out building loans from banks. In the future, building societies will have to focus even more so on their end customers and sales partners in order to reposition one of Germany’s most popular savings products.
Building societies are struggling with changed customer behavior, new consumer needs and the question of the meaningfulness of the product. They are competing with the credit offers of the mortgage banks and at the same time are confronted with the desire of many customers to conduct business digitally, to conclude transactions online and 24/7 at will. As a result, building societies find it difficult to prove the relevance of their products to customers and sales partners—especially young people are increasingly unfamiliar with the products offered by building societies.
Building societies must tailor their products to the individual needs of each customer and the respective customer segments. They can only develop both personalized and standardized sales approaches and win new customer segments if they use existing data intelligently. This treasure trove of data is needed in order to understand and analyze the changed customer behavior and to align the future strategy with it. In the future, building societies will have to work beyond customer orientation towards complete customer centricity and evolve from providing products to solutions. This leads to better customer experiences and increased customer satisfaction, which in turn generates higher customer revenues for the institutions.
Across the board, institutions need to recognize that digitalization is unstoppable and must be seen not as a risk but as an opportunity. Building societies will only be able to consistently align their business to customer needs if they make full use of digitalization and build their innovative strength.
Developing customer-centric solutions
zeb helps building societies to align entire value chains and organizations to achieve digital customer experiences. zeb has extensive knowledge from numerous projects so that the institutions learn to store and evaluate customer data in order to develop a 360° customer understanding. We help them to immerse themselves in the customer’s world in order to offer personalized offers and services in the respective individual situations. For example, we help with the design and implementation of chatbot or voicebot solutions that provide customers and internal departments ample opportunities for finding information while reducing costs. The further development of individual communication is also important—for example via web, app, telephone and messenger.
In this regard, we are aware of the importance of continuous customer feedback: It is one of the most important indicators for improving product offerings and streamlining processes. For many institutions, it therefore pays off to set up a department for customer management as well as an innovation center.
Promoting of value-oriented growth
zeb helps building societies to design, plan and implement their strategy as well as their professional and technical objectives. We enable institutions to calculate the current value and potential of customers and build customer-focused service platforms. They learn to develop customer journeys and to analyze different types of customers—so-called personas—and target groups. Regardless of the target generation building societies should develop tailor-made customer contact points for each group—for example via social media such as Facebook, Instagram or Youtube, but also through other contact and dialog formats within the framework of integrated multi-channel communication.
