‘The persona touch’: Can customer profiles forge deeper connections and grow deposits?

A version of this article first appeared in BAI’s June Executive Report: Evaluating customer service across the enterprise. you’ll find insightful coverage in the issue on SMB customer care, investing in call center talent and customer-focused SaaS that’s designed for the financial sector, plus much more.

Ever since the popularity of online banking has reduced the need for human interaction, financial institutions have focused on new ways to maintain a personal touch. Increasingly, banks and credit unions strive for personalized, yet still efficient, online messaging and elevated individual customer attention through “personas.”

Personas may look different across financial institutions, but in broad terms, they are representations of groups within the customer base who have similar financial behaviors and goals, says Erin Lutz, assistant vice president at EmpowerFI. When a particular customer’s persona pops up on a personal banker’s screen, it’s as if someone is introducing the customer to that banker, even if the actual customer is proving to be elusive: “This is John Smith. He has significant financial obligations—paying college tuitions and trying to save more for retirement.”

Different approaches—varying by cost and level of precision—can be used to create personas, says Adrian Moise, CEO at Aequilibrium, a digital brand consultancy. And recently, the galloping growth in artificial intelligence (AI) allows budget-constrained institutions to inject customer data with AI-powered software to build out personas more cost-efficiently.

Chris Caulfield, leader of the financial services practice at consulting firm West Monroe, says institutions see benefits from training staffers—particularly frontline employees—on personas.

For at least one bank, the customer buckets used by that frontline group are sorted by assets and experiences.

“We’ve designed the consumer side primarily by life-driven events as well as where [customers] are financially,” says Don Elliott, vice president of customer experience at the $30 billion FNBO (First National Bank of Omaha), which has embraced use of personas for several years.

“For instance, one persona is someone who is “just starting to gain financial independence and everything is a first for them… first job, first car loan, first apartment,” he said.

By employing data analytics, surveying department managers and conducting customer focus groups, FNBO developed 16 personas, divided between business and consumer lines, distinct to FNBO.

On the business end, FNBO aligns persona segments with the complexity of the decision-making within that business, adds Elliott.

For instance, one segment is “the self-employed business owner who is just looking for independence—growing the enterprise isn’t important to him—and who makes all his business and personal finance decisions together.” And that’s not the only business customer. An entrepreneur who is intent on expanding and has differing personal and business financial issues is yet another persona at FNBO.

Personal, not transactional

For frontline workers, knowing a customer’s persona can transform conversations, says Elliott.

“Before, it was very transactional, with personal bankers saying, ‘Hello, how can I help you?’” he says. Now, cued by a persona—and perhaps even AI-generated talking points—bankers can ask the customer questions about their wider concerns.

Many customer-facing staffers are hesitant to suggest products to customers, believing that is a sales role and outside the scope of their service role, West Monroe’s Caulfield says. But with personas, training for customer-facing staffers should stress that “serving the customer appropriately” involves suggestions that can improve their financial well-being, he adds.

After FNBO introduced personas, “the feedback we got from personal bankers was ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever had those conversations,’” says Elliott. Now, the bankers report that customers typically welcome questions on whether they’d like advice on retirement planning or other goals, and the number of referrals to other experts within FNBO has risen.

On the business side, bankers also suggest FNBO services that might be beneficial, like the FNBO business advisory or corporate 401(k) program. In fact, it may be easier for business bankers to make persona-based suggestions, believes Caulfield, because they often consider themselves in an advisory role. 

Workshops, at which frontline staffers practice tailoring conversations to certain personas, are one of the most effective ways to boost staffers’ comfort and skill in tailoring conversations, Moise, of Aequilibrium, says.

Always frontline appropriate?

SouthState Bank has been using personas for a number of years. “I became involved in 2019 to standardize personas and further build them out,” says Chris Nichols, director of capital markets of the $45 billion institution based in Winter Haven, Fla.

“At a minimum, separate personas should be mapped to the zeitgeist to create effective marketing messages,” Nichols says. That could mean that dozens of personas could be developed.

But he believes that the complexity of so many personas is one big reason why customer-facing staff doesn’t benefit from persona training.

Besides, “bankers intuitively pick up on the desires, level of education, urgency and concerns of a customer” without creating generalized personas, Nichols argues.

Still, SouthState does use generative AI that frontline staff can access, inserting prompts for the best way to explain products to different customer segments. This access puts product information in front of bankers with ease that could have only been imagined in the pre-gen AI days.

Other bankers express concern about customer comfort level should they catch on to these generalizations.

At Tropical Financial Credit Union (TFCU), “we don’t want members to think we’re bugging them,” says Amy McGraw, vice president of marketing and chief experience officer of the $1 billion Miramar, Fla., credit union. Although it has used personas for a decade, chiefly for online communications, TFCU has become increasingly sophisticated in how its personas are defined. Until recently, the credit union had just a handful of persona categories for its retail membership.

Now, the credit union works with a firm that uses AI to track each member’s interactions on the TFCU website—which is personalized with content, especially graphics, based on a member’s persona. Soon, frontline staffers will be able to also see a member’s recent activity on the TCFU site pop up on their screen when they’re serving that member.

McGraw notes that “it may not always be appropriate” for a customer representative to mention products or services that a member’s online activity indicates they’re interested in. Soon, TFCU will develop training on how to determine if a member wants to quickly complete a transaction or might be open to a wider discussion.

Impact, momentum & stereotypes

Even with the best training, maintaining staffers’ enthusiasm can be problematic, says FNBO’s Elliott, but he also stresses the bank’s reliance on this format for record-keeping.

“In all our monthly reporting, we report by persona,” says Elliott. “We also monitor customer sentiment—overall satisfaction, what is working and not working, where we can improve—via our various surveys. In addition, we monitor how many new customers we are attracting by persona, as well as how many we are retaining.”

Tracking whether the use of personas has an impact on net promoter scores (NPS) is another way to measure their success, says Caulfield. NPS, one of the most popular customer satisfaction metrics, measures loyalty, but specifically the likelihood of a customer recommending a brand.

For personas to succeed by any measure, institutions must be careful to avoid “stereotypes heavily influenced by demographics,” says Nichols. “Promoting racial, ethnic, gender or ageist bias is not only morally wrong, but also lazy marketing that is ineffective.”

Keeping the focus on, “Where do customers in that persona ‘spend’ their attention, and what are they trying to get done in life?” is the proper persona-building tool, he says.

Marilyn Kennedy Melia is a contributing writer for BAI.