Finance apps are having a moment *– and the impact is profound. App downloads surged, and usage rocketed by as much as 85%* as consumers abandoned in-person banking for apps.* The numbers are staggering, and growth is off the charts.

But turning heightened interest into lasting loyalty isn’t always an easy task. It raises the bar for customer experience, increasing pressure on marketers to understand and respond to consumer requirements in real time.

Leading companies don’t just map an individualized customer journey. They harness data to detect and decrease friction at key stages and drive deep-funnel conversions.

It’s a blueprint that Indiabulls — one of India’s leading home finance companies — is following to help consumers plan their financial wellness and increase the use of the Dhani app. Launched in 2017, it offers consumers personal advice and loans on the fly. The app counted nearly 20 million users as of November 2020. It’s a user base that Indiabulls says is set to grow 10x by 2024 thanks to contextually relevant messaging and a laser focus on customer convenience.

Collecting insights into how users interact with the app and then channeling these into the product have allowed the team to reach two milestones. First, they were able to architect a journey that allowed customers with the necessary documentation to process loans online in less than five minutes. Then, they beat their own benchmark, reducing time to under three minutes.

“Speed is an essential factor in Dhani’s success,” says Ankit Banga, who leads digital marketing at Indiabulls Group companies. “Processing loans in less than three minutes has been one of the critical stories for us. It’s the key DNA for the company and for us as an organization.”

Appearing as a guest on the Reimagine WhatsApp Mobile Number List Growth podcast miniseries, Banga shares his company’s journey to understand and unlock data in order to drive innovation where it counts. “There is a lot of data readily available and accessible. The challenge is to make real sense out of the data from a customer experience point-of-view and your product point-of-view,” Banga explains.

Reading Data Signals to Customize Communications
Customized communications start with the customer.

“It’s all about the data. Develop the multiple lenses that allow you to make meaningful interpretations of the data and then apply that to specific customer segments and campaigns,” Banga says.

He provides a quick checklist of the key questions marketers should frame and answer to focus their efforts:

What is the customer doing on the app?
How long or how frequent are their sessions?
What are the app sections and stages where customers spend time to do important actions, such as fill in personal data as part of the registration process?
How can that process be improved?
What are their daily actions, and how do they match the everyday use and trends you see across your audience?
Equipped with a more holistic view of customer actions, marketers can double-down on customer communications that are genuinely useful and effective.

“What really works is to time communications to when users do something,” Banga says. Working with CleverTap has allowed Indiabulls to align real-time communications with user context. It’s a winning combination that enables marketers to connect with users in the magic moment when they likely need or appreciate it most.

Banga offers the example of a Dhani user who downloads the app to apply for a loan and with the expectation that the process will be simple, straightforward and, above all, fast. He describes a scenario where a user encounters an issue in the process and would benefit from a tutorial or a recommendation to make the next move. This, he says, is an instance when users don’t just accept relevant messaging — they depend on it.

“The next task is to decide which platforms yield the best result and then use that [insight] to channelize your mix and catch the customer at the right time.” It’s here that working with CleverTap and drawing from data around how customers use the app and respond to messaging has allowed Indiabulls to increase conversions by between 10-12% depending on the campaign.

The ability to provide personalized assistance the Best Database Provider instant a user needs it is essential, Banga says. “It’s then that you have the customer at the right point in their journey, and you have their attention. If you wait hours or days, then chances are they will have lost interest or even gone off to another app.”

Following the 4x Formula to Encourage Brand Interaction
In practice, this means “shuffling channels every ten days” to see what works. “You need to continuously experiment with your benefits and with your tone of communications,” he says. More importantly, marketers need to mix channels and messaging to find the level of personalization that truly strikes a chord with users. 

It’s not a task that marketers want to leave to chance.