How a multinational financial services firm improved its customer experience

A multinational financial services firm wanted to improve the customer experience (CX) across the journey, including acquisition, onboarding, and renewal.

They wanted to be more purposeful about the relevance, frequency, and timeliness of emails from different departments, making sure there weren’t too many emails and that communications with their customers were not disruptive. The goal was to ensure they were sending timely and relevant content to the right customers at the right time from the right channel. Achieving this would ultimately strengthen the customer experience, which would make customers more likely to engage, respond, and take an action.

Having partnered with Fusion on various strategic initiatives for years, the company tapped us for assistance. Our mandate centered around customer acquisition through email marketing process improvement. In order to support a considerable number of new products being introduced, our client needed to scale and target their acquisition email processes more effectively.

Our team began by conducting extensive interviews with stakeholders across their internal email marketing process, from inception to creation, review, platform and delivery workflow, through Salesforce. We wanted to gain a clear and accurate understanding of:

• The company’s strategy around how to engage customers
• The role of marketing automation
• The existing platforms and how well they support the type of engagement the client wants to have with its customers
• Current processes, glitches, and challenges

We additionally poured through internal documents and platform specifications. Together, we used all this information to identify patterns and needs. We then walked through the process, mapping the systems and procedures to visualize areas of opportunity.

Our assessment revealed that it took much more time than expected to send a marketing email. Collateral had to be created, reviewed, and approved by numerous departments, passed on to other departments, and then given a last review by marketing and a final department.

With an accurate picture of the current state, we collaborated with the client to deliver re-envisioned workflows and a roadmap of actionable recommendations. These recommendations fell into three categories: design and content, process and capabilities, and collaboration and governance.

Our recommendations went beyond the tactical execution of campaigns. Many suggestions focused on renovating internal processes – how the client gets things done, collaborates, strategizes, and engages the customer. We also defined a need for standardized, reusable email formats, integration or reduction of systems, implementation of marketing automation to create efficiencies, and more collaboration across siloed teams.