State of Digital Customer Acquisition: Much Work Remains

Digital customer acquisition was a white hot topic before the pandemic and has exploded since then. Our March 2021 Digital Banking Panel survey looks in detail at the state of digital customer acquisition across products, pain points, and future plans. If you are a banker and would like to participate in future digital banking research panels, please register here.

Despite the rapid growth of digital customer acquisition and increasingly broad industry adoption, capabilities remain nascent. Digital customer acquisition is new for most institutions. The opportunity for improvement is large, and much work remains to be done.

Selected examples of report findings include:

• Enterprisewide approaches are rare. Most institutions run multiple applications with capabilities varying by product, producing inconsistent efficacy and customer experiences (CX).
• Remarkably, fewer than 10% of surveyed institutions employ modern identity verification mechanisms.
• Better measurement could help optimize the process and identify further improvement opportunities. While 70% of respondents monitor application abandonment rates, other KPIs are tracked less frequently.
• ... and many more in the report!

Source: Celent Survey of NA financial institutions, March 2021, n=58. Q. Who owns the process and technology for digital customer acquisition in your organization?

Successful digital customer acquisition rests on more than sound technology. We describe and recommend putting into practice seven habits for highly effective customer acquisition, distilled by Celent from multiple case studies demonstrating industry best practice.