In today’s rapidly evolving financial landscape, customers expect more than just digital convenience—they demand seamless, hyper-personalized experiences across every touchpoint, from the branch and mobile app to contact centers, voice assistants, and wearables. For banks, orchestrating truly omnichannel engagement is no longer a differentiator; it’s a necessity for growth, customer loyalty, and regulatory compliance.
Modern banking customers don’t distinguish between channels—they see one bank. Whether depositing a check at a branch, checking balances on a smartwatch, or chatting with a representative online, they expect their experience to be consistent, intuitive, and tailored to their needs. Research shows that 95% of consumers use three or more channels in a single service interaction, and 65% are frustrated by inconsistent experiences across those channels. This expectation extends to employees as well: staff in branches and contact centers need unified tools and data to serve customers efficiently and empathetically, regardless of how or where the interaction begins.
Despite significant investments in digital transformation, many banks still struggle to deliver on the promise of omnichannel. The primary barriers are both technical and organizational:
To overcome these challenges, banks must embrace a new approach—one that unifies capabilities, data, and experiences across the entire organization.
At the heart of omnichannel engagement is the ability to create and maintain a single, integrated customer profile—a 360-degree view that brings together data from every interaction, channel, and product. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are emerging as the core technology to enable this vision. By ingesting, integrating, and continuously updating data from multiple sources, CDPs allow banks to:
Integrated customer profiles not only enhance the customer experience but also empower employees with the context and insights needed to resolve issues quickly and proactively recommend relevant products or services.
Hyper-personalization—delivering the right message, offer, or service to the right customer at the right time—is the new battleground in banking. Achieving this at scale requires more than just marketing automation; it demands a robust data foundation, advanced analytics, and the ability to orchestrate journeys across both digital and physical channels.
Regulations such as the UK’s Consumer Duty raise the stakes, requiring banks to demonstrate that they are acting in customers’ best interests and providing fair, tailored outcomes. This means moving beyond basic demographic segmentation to incorporate behavioral, transactional, and even psychographic data. Advanced segmentation techniques enable banks to identify nuanced customer needs and vulnerabilities, ensuring that products and communications are both relevant and compliant.
Delivering seamless omnichannel engagement requires a modern, composable architecture. Rather than building monolithic platforms around static customer journeys, leading banks are adopting microservices and domain-driven design to create loosely coupled, capability-based systems. This approach allows for:
Cloud technologies further accelerate this transformation, providing the agility, scalability, and security required to support omnichannel strategies and regulatory demands.
Technology alone is not enough. Banks must also rethink their organizational structures, moving from product-centric silos to cross-functional teams aligned around customer journeys and outcomes. Empowered, agile teams can iterate quickly, experiment safely, and continuously improve both customer and employee experiences. This cultural shift is essential for realizing the full potential of omnichannel engagement.
Banks that invest in omnichannel engagement are seeing tangible benefits:
Publicis Sapient partners with leading financial institutions to design and implement omnichannel engagement platforms that break down silos, accelerate innovation, and deliver measurable business impact. Our approach combines strategy, technology, and organizational change. We help clients define a customer-centric data taxonomy and operating model, build cross-disciplinary teams, modernize legacy systems, and foster a test-and-learn culture for continuous improvement.
Our work has enabled banks to achieve a 360-degree view of the customer, accelerate onboarding, enhance compliance, and deliver measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and speed to market. By embracing modern architectures, integrated data platforms, and agile ways of working, banks can not only meet rising expectations but also unlock new sources of growth and loyalty in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Ready to lead the way in omnichannel banking? Connect with Publicis Sapient’s financial services experts to start your transformation journey today.