How Seacoast Bank Is Connecting With The Digital Customer Via Data & Analytics

As life becomes increasingly digital, it’s vital that businesses adapt to new trends in customer behavior and expectations. This changing behavior brings great opportunity, as companies have many new ways to understand consumers and adapt to their needs. However, it also brings new challenges, particularly for small and midsize companies, as failing to remain in line with their expectations will lead to poor customer experience.

Some of the most exciting new tools that businesses are using to make sure they get it right involve artificial intelligence (AI) – specifically, machine learning. These are algorithms that become increasingly accurate at making predictions as they are given more data. When it comes to understanding customers in the digital age, this technology is used by forward-thinking organizations to answer questions like "who are my most valuable customers?", "How do they want to engage with us?” and “How do we ensure our products and services become their go-to solutions for their own challenges and problems?”

Other hugely transformative trends affecting the way that businesses connect with customers today include the increasing demand for improved experience and more personalized services, wide-scale adoption of subscription services, and a growing tendency for customers to want to engage directly with brands rather than go through "middlemen." There is also undoubtedly an increasing interest in “conscious consumption” – a desire to reward businesses that follow sustainable models and limit their impact on the environment.

All of these seismic shifts in behavioral patterns are noticeable across all industries, but financial services – with their focus on technology and rapid pace of innovation – is somewhere they are particularly apparent. Much has been written about the impact of disruptors in the fintech space – small and agile startups who have been successful at taking market share from well-established institutions, largely due to strategies involving new, customer-facing technology solutions.

In many ways, this has led to established institutions playing catch-up. To understand how companies, including SMBs, are facing up to these challenges, I spoke to Robert Stillwell, analytics officer for Seacoast Bank. Although Seacoast has a 95-year history and operates exclusively in Florida, for the last three years, it has been listed among the Fortune 100 list of fastest-growing companies. Largely this is due to a renewed focus on building connections with digital customers.

He told me, "We are in this era of unprecedented technological change … and what we’re seeing is customers are much more informed than ever before, and they have much more choice than ever before.”

To meet this challenge, his team at Seacoast built systems specifically designed to provide what is termed the "Single View of the Customer." The aim is to avoid the problems caused by siloed data – where previously, many different departments from marketing to finance may have collected and stored data in their own structures and formats, effectively making it useless to those in other arms of the organization.

“When we first started, one of the questions we had was how many customers do we have? And we didn’t even really know the answer to that…” Stillwell admits.

With any business, once that data is consolidated into the “single view” that Seacoast championed, it becomes far simpler to initiate processes that hit the key trends consumers are buying into today – digitization, personalization, direct engagement, subscription-based services, and so on.

One successful initiative was aimed at raising awareness and encouraging engagement with the facility to deposit cheques digitally. Customers who were still visiting branches to physically deposit cheques over the counter were targeted with direct communications promoting the digital facilities.

“A large proportion of customers were depositing cheques in our branches … and of course that’s a service we provide”, Stillwell says.

“But it felt like an opportunity … it's not really efficient for Seacoast to be processing these cheques manually and … it's not convenient for customers, they’ve got to drive to a branch and get parked and wait in line … when they could just do the deposit from their mobile phone at home.”

This one initiative had the effect of increasing customer engagement with the digital service, while at the same time improving overall customer experience and convenience.

My own experience working with small and medium-sized businesses tells me that it isn’t only large companies such as banks and financial institutions that are tapping these trends to engage customers in new and exciting ways.

Seacoast used the SAS Viya platform to develop its Single View approach to data infrastructure, and the same platform has successfully been used by companies ranging from sports teams to non-profits to improve overall customer experience. You can read more about this and other customer stories in this free eBook: ‘Improving Customer Experience: How organizations of all sizes are using analytics to gain customer insights, make better decisions and grow their business.

Other companies are taking the approach pioneered by internet giants like Amazon and Netflix to drive truly personalized experiences through technology. Makeup manufacturer L’Oreal, for example, allows customers to have their skin scanned in-store in order to have a personalized color palette created for them. And Stitch Fix picks personalized selections of clothing that are matched to individual customer preferences by AI algorithms. This trend is defined by Gartner as “a process that creates an interaction between two parties that is individual and relevant to the person.”

Together, these trends offer smaller businesses some hugely exciting opportunities around forging new or stronger connections with their customers and fully realizing the engagement potential of digital channels. Data and analytics make it possible to develop the type of in-depth, 360-degree view needed to make truly personal connections with customers. These are connections that will increasingly be seen as valuable to consumers who have more choice than ever before, and who's buying decisions are increasingly driven by the quality of experience.

You can watch my webinar with Robert Stillwell, analytics officer for Seacoast Bank, here.

As well as the topics covered in this article, we talk about the importance of picking the right technology partner and the right way for small and medium-sized companies to get started on their analytics journey.

Thank you for reading my post.?Here?at LinkedIn?and at?Forbes?I regularly write about management and technology trends. To read my future?posts simply?join my network here?or click 'Follow'. Also feel free to connect with me via?Twitter,??Facebook,?Instagram,?Slideshare?or?YouTube.

About Bernard Marr

Bernard Marr is a world-renowned futurist, influencer and thought leader in the field of business and technology. He is the author of 20 best-selling books, writes a regular column for Forbes and advises and coaches many of the world’s best-known organisations. He has over 2 million social media followers, over 1 million newsletter subscribers and was ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world and the No 1 influencer in the UK.