David Hetling, Global Marketing Director, Financial Services, RWS
Financial institutions will always play a critical role in society, offering essential services to individuals and businesses. However, as technology continues to advance, it is essential for the industry to evolve and adapt to the changing landscape, particularly when it comes to how they engage with customers. While many have embraced the digital opportunity, there is a risk of alienating customers if they fail to nurture a more personalised relationship.
Recent research by RWS, ‘Unlocked 2023: In Understanding We Trust,’ reveals that nearly half of global consumers are frustrated by the dominance of the English language on the internet and technology, and 45% of consumers will not engage with a financial institution if there are no local language options available. For financial companies, this means they need to respect cultural differences and context when engaging with diverse audiences. Failure to do so risks pushing customers towards alternatives that better understand and appreciate their cultural needs, priorities and deeply personal preferences.
The research, which involved 6,500 consumers across 13 countries, also found that nine out of ten consumers feel brands must show their understanding and appreciation of national identity, culture, or languages. But only 23% of global consumers feel that global brands understand them and their needs and priorities. This finding should be a stark reminder that financial services providers should continually strive to demonstrate that they understand their customers.
Unlocking understanding
For financial firms that want to demonstrate to customers that they understand them, there are three essential criteria that their communications should strive to meet:
- CONSISTENCY: Brands understand the importance of consistent messaging and positioning across channels, contexts and touchpoints. The ideal is to create a single locally relevant, global customer experience. Questions arise around the balance between global messaging and market localisation. In the past, this meant a trade off in terms of control. Today’s technology means you can have both – localisation with control.
- CONTEXT
Customers today expect personalised communications. They expect brands to use data to identify devices, channels, contexts, individuals and markets. They expect a seamless, relevant, timely experience every time. This takes us beyond consistent brand messaging and content and into actionable localization driven by data and automation. We should be conscious that these are now mainstream global consumer expectations.
- CULTURE
The third criterion is the most demanding. It requires real insight into local cultures to be truly inclusive and to produce the engaging content that builds lasting relationships. This dimension complements and extends the focus on context to include local laws and regulations. For example, consider the importance of design colour – and how they are interpreted differently in various cultures.
Combining tech and human expertise
One key strategy that firms can adopt is to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to provide more personalised customer experiences. AI and ML can help companies to better understand their customers’ needs and preferences, and to tailor their services and communications accordingly. It can also be used to offer customers a more personalised service; for example, banks can use AI to analyse a customer’s spending habits and financial goals, and then offer personalised recommendations for saving or investing.
However, it is important to note that there are risks associated with AI and ML, particularly when it comes to customer communications. If customer communications are too generalised or vague, they can lead to dissatisfaction. This is where translation and localisation come into play.
Language and cultural sensitivity are crucial in building trust with customers, particularly in the financial sector. The only way to ensure you’re meeting these expectations is to involve human linguists, who can ensure that communications – and machine translation output – is truly tailored to an individual’s culture.
Increasingly, we also need to consider how trust will be impacted by new means of generating content. Large Language Models like ChatGPT are attracting huge interest and will no doubt be used increasingly by global marketers. Although they are exciting developments, they present huge challenges to societal trust and confidence in information. Such content needs to be handled very carefully by brands, requiring human oversight combined with end-to-end translation solutions before it can be considered for release.
For the foreseeable future, a combination of AI, Machine Translation, and human expertise should be at the heart of customer communications strategies. This will enable financial firms to handle high volumes of customer interactions while demonstrating that they truly understand the individual.
