Objective:
In this How-To, we will finish our New Customer Onboarding program automation by creating our Audience and Schedule. We will explore the following topics:
- How to create a dynamic New Customer Audience for automated onboarding
- How to create an effective communications schedule that will help drive conversions and engagement
Getting customers new and old to feel engaged with your products and services is always a tricky path to navigate. Communicating with customers regularly and early is an important step in the right direction for strong customer engagement. That’s why we have taken the time to lay out our recommended New Customer audience and schedule for banks just like yours. Using our large customer base, we have found that the following communication flow works extremely well in getting your new customers feeling at home within your financial institution. This tutorial assumes that you are somewhat familiar with our Core iQ system, so if you have specific questions on settings or procedures, please take a look at our detailed Audience & Schedule Breakdown document.
Creating a Target Audience
We will start by creating our target audience in the Target Audience and Communications area, which can be found in the Communications dropdown menu. Begin by creating a new audience, which we will name ‘New Customer Onboarding’. If you are building this audience specifically for a product or set of products, you can use the second section of this page to tell Core iQ which service groups you want to use as filters on your audience. For this tutorial, we are creating an overall New Customer onboarding schedule so you can leave this section blank, since we will want to include all new customers. Again, we can most likely leave the very last section blank, as it is used to further exclude certain customers based on values such as their ID number, or age range. If you want to exclude new customers under the age of 18, you can do so within this last section.
Once we have our audience defined in this area, we can click Save and move on to our schedule.
Creating an Onboarding Schedule
Since all of our schedule points will be hinging off of the date that the customer joins our financial institution, we will need to get familiar with the term Original Customer Date in Core iQ. The Original Customer Date is the exact day that a new customer joins your organization, regardless of how many products they subsequently open. This means that for a brand new Customer Onboarding schedule, any trigger points that are set to Original Customer Date will only work for people that are new customers after that date. This is the perfect trigger point for all three of our scheduled communications.
We will start our communications schedule with a Welcome Letter from our Bank President. This will serve as an initial communication from the bank, 1 day after the Original Customer Date. To achieve this, we will create a new schedule point for our Audience, and we will set the Trigger Event to “Original Customer Date”, with a Wait Time of “1 Day After”. We will also want to keep our customers from receiving multiple Welcome Letters if they open more than one account on their first visit. To do this, we just need to change the option on Generate 1 Regardless of Accounts Opened Concurrently from No to Yes.
To connect an Active Template to a schedule touch point, we will need to designate our template using the option labeled Specify a Template to Use. After we assign the correct template here, we will want to ensure that the template is marked as 'Active' by navigating to that template in the Communication Templates area, checking for a YES on the Template is Approved by Compliance & Active toggle.
Finally, we want to go to the Accountability section of this schedule point to set the Responsible Banker to our Bank President. We also want to set the Default Status to either Pending Approval or Reviewed and Approved. To start, you might want to have this set to Pending Approval, which sends the Core iQ Admins a copy of each communication to approve before it is sent. But to get the full benefit of Core iQ’s automation, you will want to move each schedule point to Reviewed and Approved as soon as you can. Once you have that done, congratulate yourself because you now have the first point in your New Customer Onboarding schedule fully automated.
For the next two schedule points, you will be following these same steps, but with these changes:
- For the second schedule point, at 360 Days After the Original Customer Date, I want to send an Anniversary Communication in the form of our postcard. I just need to connect the approved template I created earlier and change the No to Yes on Generate 1 Regardless of Accounts Opened Concurrently. Since this is from our Assigned Banker, I want to make sure the Responsible Banker is set to “Assigned Banker”
- For the final schedule point, at 365 Days After the Original Customer Date, I want to send a Customer Satisfaction survey to anyone with an email on file. All I need to do is connect the approved Customer Satisfaction template I created earlier and change the No to Yes on Generate 1 Regardless of Accounts Opened Concurrently. Again, for this template I want the Responsible Banker to be the “Assigned Banker”.
Once you have these three schedule points correctly configured, you are finished with your New Customer Onboarding schedule! If all of those templates were Approved, then the schedule will begin to send as soon as you have a new customer that meets the requirements for the audience.
Why doesn’t the schedule have more contact points?
You might be wondering why our New Customer Onboarding schedule just has three communication points. Contacting a customer only three times doesn’t seem like it is frequent enough to foster a fully engaged customer. Well, that’s because three communications aren’t enough to fully onboard your new customers. We recommend supplementing this schedule by creating a product-based onboarding program for each of your major Service Groups. With a basic new customer schedule like the one we just built, you can easily move towards product specific schedules for things like auto loans, mortgages, and timed deposits. This allows you to be extremely granular with your wording and especially your cross-selling, allowing you to better market to your new and existing customers throughout the year.
We have a number of recommended schedules on the Onovative website that will give you a great starting place for your own product-based onboarding program. Hopefully this New Customer Onboarding schedule has given you the confidence to create a more expansive onboarding program at your financial institution. We want to supplement your efforts with Core iQ and allow you to feel confident automating as much of your communication as you can. So if you have any questions regarding the best product-based onboarding strategies, please feel free to email our Client Success team.