Session Recap: From Insights to Impact: Key Takeaways from Marilyn Howe at Future Branches Boston 2025

[2025], [Future Branches Boston].[Keynote] – [Day 1, Track A -From Insights to Impact: Building a Data-First Omnichannel Strategy]

EJ Kritz, Chief Experience Officer, DBSI: Boy, we are, you all are probably filling up note pages. There's some good stuff coming out today. And we have one last speaker before lunch. After the speaker, we're gonna give you some instructions on where lunch is and how to get there and what to do and round tables this afternoon and so on and so forth.

I look forward to sharing. It is gonna be all you hear from me until the end of the event. I look forward to sharing a few closing thoughts with you guys towards the end as well as one special offer, which if you want to get that ahead of time. Visit our DBSI booth during free time. But in the meantime, we have one final morning or early afternoon keynote, and that's from Marilyn Howe from Debolt.

So please give Marilyn a big round of applause. Here we go.

Marilyn Howe, Senior Manager, Global Advisory Services, Diebold Nixdorf: Thank you. Hello. All right. I know everybody's hungry. We'll get started. When I start first started thinking about this session, I knew I wanted to focus in on the role of our delivery channels in driving exceptional consumer experience. But as I started going through my own experiences as a consumer, I realized all of my best experiences weren't with my financial institution.

They were with retailers. I know we've heard that a few times this morning. So today, I wanna dig into that a little bit. I want to see what it is. What are those key elements that retailers are hitting on that are driving those exceptional consumer experiences? And to do this, we'll take a look at some of the examples from Dbol nextdoor on how we're providing data and analytics to help our customers develop their strategic roadmaps with.

All right, so we already know this. Consumer expectations are not limited to banking experiences. So let's take a look at some of the different things that retailers are doing today to delight their customers rewards. And these are just a couple things that came to mind for me, but rewards is number one.

So if you're getting cash back, even if it's cash to use at the same retailer, if you're getting free hotel nights, if you're getting discounts on your commonly used products, these are things that feel good. These are tangible. This is gonna trigger dopamine. It's your body's reward system. I'm no expert on this, but this is science I.

Personalization. There are tons of organizations that are doing this very effectively today, but I had to call out Nike Plus because I married to a sneaker head, and I know that they do a fantastic job of showing their customers that they know them. They know exactly what shoe you like, and of course the size.

They also know what sports you like, what athletes you like, and not only they can, they offer you personalized offers. They can offer you exclusivity. They can give you early access to those products. They can give you discounts. They can give you access to exclusive events where you can bring a friend, you can get early access to tickets.

This is a way to drive loyalty and make sure that you're coming to them for all of your shoe needs. Advice. It's always unsolicited, but always personalized and relevant. So I love this backend connection between target and pin, excuse me, target and Pinterest. So when you're on Pinterest and you're scrolling, you're pinning things which automatically indicates that you like it.

Target is getting all of that data on the backend. It's looking at all of its products and it's matching it to things that you like, and then it's sending you a link and it's saying, Hey, you can buy this. You can buy this online, you can buy this in our store. It really wants you to come into the store because then you'll also spend $500 that you weren't planning to spend that day.

It's been known to happen, but you can also get it delivered, and it's just one more way that they're proactively reaching out to you and driving for their business. And the last one is access. So the Harvard Business Review says three out of four consumers. Prefer shopping through multiple channels. And I would venture a guess that's actually four out of four.

I don't think anybody's I am going into the store every time, or I'm only doing this on my phone. You want to have all of those different options. So I love the example of Walmart Plus because they're doing the impossible and they're taking on Amazon Prime and they're doing it successfully. And the one differentiator they have is physical delivery.

Walmart Plus has a store you can go into for your return. Although I know Amazon Prime also does the Kohl's thing, but Walmart Plus is crushing it. 65% of Walmart plus members used to be Prime members, so they're converting them over. And then not only that, they're spending more, they spend 35% more than non-members.

So in a competitive environment, this matters. So how are we doing in banking today? So I love this quote. This was from the financial brand. It was an article about how credit union is innovating with ai. And the quote was, we're not competing just with banks, we're competing with retailers because everybody is so used to the ease and simplicity of technology.

So this got me thinking, what are we doing with our channels in banking? How can we start to get on this level? So the Accenture Global Consumer Banking Survey, I think that's what it's called, came out this year, just a few months back. And I was really inspired by the data they have. So there was 50,000 respondent.

A huge sample size and over 200 financial institutions were surveyed. So the data is really robust, statistically significant, which is hard to get. It's hard to get a read on what the consumers are actually looking for. So with respect to channel usage, consumers are using the big four ATM mobile app branch online.

Think we all know that those are the most commonly used for ATM users. A common ATM user might use it once a week. The app users three times a week, online platforms twice a week, and the branch about every one and a half to two months, but was really striking to me from this data, however, was the satisfaction.

So for those consumers who responded that they were very satisfied with that interaction, the most satisfied you could get from that interaction was for the app. And only 60% of consumers who use the app responded that they were very satisfied with that interaction. ATM came next with 57% very satisfied, and then web and branch were around 52, 51, and one out of two positive experiences or very satisfied experiences really seems like a miss.

I think there's so much more we can be doing with personalization to take our channels to that next level. And what's our big why? So this is also from the Accenture survey. But what we were looking at was those loyalty indices. So if a customer says, I am loyal to you, banker credit union, that means that your revenue is growing 2.6 times more than if you have a lower loyalty indices.

And that's based on that that data from the 200 different financial institutions in North America. That's especially true. That loyalty is driving revenue. In addition, it's creating stickier consumers. So these consumers have 20%, nearly 20% more products and services with you, and it's a deeper relationship.

There's a greater chance that you're the primary financial institution because they have 30% greater share of their wallet with you. So how does Dbol fit into all this? So I'll back up a little and I'll introduce my team. I run the advisory services team at Dbol nextdoor. We are the consulting arm of the organization and our entire job to make sure that our customers and partners have the data that you need in order to tell your story internally to justify your case for change and your investment in technology.

We're also there to make sure that you're making the right investments. Is it the right technology? Is it the right market? What's the overall demand? So how do we do this? We're pulling some examples from what we saw in retail. So number one, we are delighting our customer and member through those various channels.

Number two, we're driving loyalty and in turn, that's going to drive value for the business. So first, we're going to take a look at your customers and members and understand how they're transacting today. What are the channels that they're gravitating towards? What are the ones where they're more resistant?

Maybe there's some optimization or efficiencies to be found there. The second one is uncovering unique market characteristics. So not just understanding your customers today, but understanding your wider market dynamics. The third one is understanding your physical delivery network. And we keep hearing this branch is dead, branch is important, all these things, but it's so much more complicated than that because none of these channels exist in a vacuum.

They're all interconnected and they all contribute to that same experience for that consumer. It is a seamless experience that crosses across crosses and bridges across physical and digital. We've heard this term a few times fit for purpose, but we want to assign fit for purpose banking channels, meaning it's not technology for the sake of technology.

This is technology that is specifically aligned to a business objective and has some clear KPIs and measures of success. This one's a biggie. Let's make sure that if we're offering something, that it works as expected, and this is less of a service thing, and there's actually ways we can do this proactively from a data and analytics standpoint upfront.

And lastly, it's that personal touch. How do we drive loyalty through banking channels that know you specifically and how you wanna engage.

All right, so the first one we'll look at is understanding our customers and members. So this is getting into some of the data and analysis that we do on the consulting side. So we actually work with our customers and collect data from them. Sometimes lots of data, depending on the scope of the project, but in this case, if we're just looking to really understand the channel dynamics, what we would do is collect about three months of transaction level data, and we would look at each individual customer and member who transacted during that time period.

And what transactions they're doing. Was it through attended channels like a branch or a call center, or was it through self-service like an ATM or digital? From there, we're gonna put 'em in a bucket. We're gonna say you are pure self-service. That means don't make me talk to a person, ever, or you are pure attended.

That means I go see a person every single time. They ask me about my grandkids. I love going into a branch. And then there's all the buckets in between as well. And from there we're able to dive deeper. And this helps. This is where it gets really informative for our overall transformation strategy.

This is when we're able to get really granular. So from there we know exactly how each of your members and customers. Prefers to transact. Now we can look. How does that differ between retail and business? Obviously completely different animals. We know that business customers lean attended most of the time.

What can we do to help you? How can we make this more efficient? Are there business rules we can change? Are there staffing models we need to adjust? Is there a lobby leadership strategy that we need to employ in order to make this more effective for these different segments? On the age group side, we know that older generations tend to lead more attended, preferred.

In fact, for consumers that are 80 plus, it's 50% still are in that pure attended bucket where they want to go see a human every single time they interact. So how can we adjust our education practices, our onboarding, how can we adjust maybe our staffing in order to better accommodate these customers? And on the other side of that, it's the millennials, the Gen X, who want all the channels, the very needy ones, that they want to be able to do all the different things, and how can we adjust that accordingly?

And relationship depth is an interesting one because we can look at your best customers, the ones that have all your products and services, and really understand what their preferences are, and then use that strategy in order to deliver positive experiences for more potential customers and members that fall into those same bucket.

So transitioning away from the customer and member base, so we're able to understand them and their preferences, and we wanna make sure we're meeting that demand. But we also wanna be driving new acquisition within our markets. So it's important to know who is in our markets and how that impacts our go-to-market strategy.

So here what on the screen, this is four segments from Esri's Tapestry Segmentation. You guys might be familiar with Esri. CITAs has some similar. Buckets like this as well. But I think this is so helpful for so many different facets of transformation, whether it's branch format sales and service models branch design technology in the branch.

What this does is it buckets out the segments in the markets and gives you greater insight into who's walking into your branch. So in this case, young and restless. These individuals, we know they are renters. Many of them have roommates. They probably want to not have a roommate anymore, so maybe some mortgage information might be helpful.

Laptops and lattes, these are gonna be early in their career working at the apples and click up. They're tech savvy. You might be able to get away with a different format. That's a little high tech, high touch, fewer FTE. Rooted rural, oh, I should probably pause and say this is all based on socioeconomic characteristics.

It gives you insights into their financial life stages. It gives you insights into their home value spending habits, all of the above. And granted, we know no one fits into just one bucket, but it's far as guiding strategy. It's exceptionally helpful. So rooted rural, we're looking at individuals who are going to live far from a branch, so how can we educate them on our digital offerings in various channels?

And diverse convergence, potentially new to the area, potentially new to the market. They could probably use access to cash if they have variable access to credit and community spaces. So all of this is going to guide your transformation strategy, your branch format, and how you're going to go to market Physical Delivery Network.

So this is a hot topic and this is something I'm passionate about. So cross site usage. When you're thinking of your transformation strategy, it's important to do very structured test and learns. When before you go roll any anything out, you need to know how your different touch points are being used in tandem.

So the average branch user is using two branches per year. So possibly one by where they live, possibly one by where they work. It's important to know what groups of branches are being used so that you can ensure a consistent consumer experience across those. So whether that's a technology rollout, whether that's branch design, whether it's a new format, denominations at the ATM, you wanna make sure when these customers or members are using these different touch points, that they're able to have the same services available.

And distance thresholds. So this is a little different from the classic trade area. Trade area is looking at how far people are coming to come into your branch. A distance threshold is looking at their overall engagement. So at what distance from a branch does that engagement start to taper off? And that informs how many touch points you need to pro properly saturate a market and ensure that you're getting the maximum benefit and engagement from your customers in that market.

Fit for purpose technology solutions. So the example here is looking at a survey that Diebold commissioned with Forrester and we were asking very specific questions to understand what type of ATM functionality consumers were looking for, and that we were able to bucket that out based on different demographic characteristics.

And from there we're able to say, in this wider market, yes or no, there is demand or isn't demand. For video teller technology, and this is a big one because video teller, there's very specific use cases where it's going to be impactful. So from here we understand the market demand. We're able to marry that up then with what's going through your teller line today.

So based on the demographics of the customers and how they're transacting based on the types of transactions that are going through your teller line, we can get very granular with what we can expect in terms of deposit migration. Over to self-service. We can even build out an ROI based on efficiencies that you might may see from this technology.

And it doesn't have to be video teller, it could be deposit automation or whatever other technology you might be evaluating.

Ensure technology and service offerings perform as expected. Most of these examples I'm sharing are, somewhat ATM focused, seeing as how that is quite the focus of dn, but in this case, it is very ATM focused. This is looking at how we proactively use data and analytics to evaluate every note coming in and every note coming out of your ATM.

And this is something we're doing on the backend, so you guys don't even have to, if you are a DN customer, we are looking at this. You can imagine it's very intriguing data analytics looking at every note in and out of every ATM. But from there we're able to proactively tell you, Hey, the reason you're having to go visit this ATM is because your deposits are filling up.

Hey, you're running out of twenties. We can send you this information ahead of time. You can make some quick changes from there. Your CIT visits drop. To one time a week from three times a week. Cut your costs in two thirds, improve your uptime, improve your network efficiency, and this is before service even has to get involved.

This is all on the backend. The customer doesn't see it. It's just one of those little extra things you can do to ensure your channel is running efficiently. Take that a step further into cash recycling, so we can also model this out. And put this on a trajectory. So where are we gonna be in three years from now?

Where are we gonna be in five years? And make sure that you are optimizing for the long term. Make sure that you are prepared for those next steps. I think we always hear the term future proofing. Make sure that we are prepared for the next step in the evolution of our technology as well. Alright, and lastly, it's the personalization component.

And I think this is one of the more powerful things we can do. At the ATM that's really meaningful. When you have a good experience at an ATM, you remember it. I remember the first time I walked into a chase and they had the big screen on the a tm and I was all excited. But anyways, this one, you can do small things to say, Hey, we know it's your birthday, happy birthday, and this is all programmed in ahead of time on the back backend.

Or, Hey, we know you are eligible for this credit upgrade. All you have to do is press this button and that feeds into your sales structure on the backend as well. And then your preferences. We know what denominations you like. We know what language you speak. We know you and what you want. And this makes sure that we're not breaking the golden rule of self-service, which is you do the transaction through self-service and then have to also go do it through an attended transaction.

So this way we know what denominations to distribute, we know what the consumer wants, and we can.

All right. I know it's almost lunchtime, but I appreciate everyone's attention today. The omnichannel experience, I would encourage you to stop by booth 2 0 2 and 2 0 4 to speak with our amazing DN team who's here. We do have our DN series ATM, and our teller cash recycler, and we can do demonstrations of that, but more importantly, talk about the holistic omnichannel strategy and how it all fits together.

Thank you.Thank you so much, Marilyn.