Which Micro Moments Matter: Redefining Customer Engagement

Personalized real-time micro-engagements are reshaping the future of banking.

In a conversation with Jim Marous on the Banking Transformed podcast, Sarah Martin of Pulsate, a mobile-first multichannel proactive growth platform for financial institutions, and Eric Givens of Arizona Financial Credit Union explored how financial institutions can leverage technology to create meaningful, timely customer interactions.

Q: What were you trying to solve five years ago when you decided to work with Pulsate?

Eric Givens:Five years ago was a very different timeframe. Obviously pre-Covid. Specifically, it was before [Arizona Financial Credit Union] acquired two small banks.

At that time, we were trying to communicate better with our members or find other ways to meet them where they wanted to be communicated with.

And so, we started in 2016 or 2017, when we were like, “Okay, let’s think through the future here. How do we want to communicate with our members? What do we want to communicate with them about?”

So, in partnership with our online banking provider, we finally had the opportunity to communicate with our members differently through push notifications.

Q: How has your vision of what’s possible changed over the last five years?

Givens: Yeah. That’s a difficult question over the last five years. That’s a long time before we throw Covid into the mix. So, there has been a change. But we started doing a lot of that, transitioning to more of that digital-first year before that.

So, we did not have everything solved, but we at least felt that we were a little ahead of the game. For instance, we rolled out online account opening back in 2016 when it could have been fully done online for consumer account opening. People usually still had to come into the branch for a credit union.

That was hugely helpful when the world shut down in 2020 and people were scrambling. Luckily, we already had a solution, and the uptick was substantial.

Leveraging Mobile Banking for Customer Engagement

Q: How does Pulsate technology enable financial institutions to deliver personalized engagement?

Sarah Martin: So there are many ways. The foundation is on the data and the data choices that feed into Pulsate’s multiple channels, including push notifications, but the foundation is there.

Consider Eric’s and Arizona Financial’s 136,000 digitally active customers across our system. We consistently see that between 80 and 85% of them engage with digital banking at least once per month. On average, 27% of them check their digital banking at least once daily.

And now, I don’t know about our Arizona Financial, but most financial institutions would crumble at that level of engagement at the branch. But they would find a way, you would find a way, Eric, because you do that for your communities and your customers to make that work.

But in the digital environment, it’s like coming in and going. There needs to be something there to deepen the relationship.

Looking for more bank marketing trends?

Data-Driven Marketing Strategies in Financial Services

Q: How do you work with smaller financial institutions to improve them so they can quickly use your platform, even if they’re not ready?

Martin: : First of all, our go-live process is quite light. For the digital banking providers we work with, we can be live and you can use Pulsate to engage your customers within two weeks.

Currently, especially in Q2, we’re seeing that cadence happen, which is light. We handle most of the work because it’s our project.
But when it comes to data, it’s really interesting to consider the minimum amount of data to create the maximum rewards for the financial institution and the customer.

We’re currently working with a couple of credit unions around just one data point. At first, I was skeptical of one data point, the birthday data point. I know it’s my birthday; don’t tell me it’s my birthday. But it’s not that.

What we’ve been working with and our CS team, has been fantastic on this, working with these couple of credit unions, just that one data point everybody has. And just being able to send a message, be it an in-app or just through the feed post saying “happy birthday.”

Q: Can you tell us a little about your pre-approval campaign and other types of campaigns that work well on the mobile banking app?

Givens: Yeah. You mentioned that we want to ensure that our members know that they have an offer just in case they come to a time when they’re like, “Oh, man, I have to apply for a loan.”

So, part of the communication method is to say, “Hey, you know what? You are pre-approved.” It’s big. It helps out by just making sure that there’s awareness of what offers they have.

So, in a typical pre-approval campaign for us, we’ll have a list of pre-approved members for, let’s say, an auto loan. And this is where the technology partners come together. We have one particular partner who helps us with those Q-Nexus or TruStage. I believe it’s named now.

But we have one particular vendor who helps us show these approvals. We have another one, our online banking provider and then we have Pulsate, which lives on top of it.

Overcoming Challenges in Personalized Communication

Q: What challenges did you face in building this personalized communication platform for your members?

Givens:So, for us, let’s talk with Pulsate; since we were one of the first, our journey might’ve been slightly longer because we were building this out with Pulsate, which was great. I mean, it was a great partnership. How did we build these things out?

And so, things that we had to overcome — this is going to sound funny — are, well, how many times should we communicate? We can now send messages constantly. How much is too much? Is it too saturated? When will people say, “OK, these are enough push notifications?”
Now, it was five or six years ago. As you know, our younger generations expect to receive these types of messages, especially if they are pertinent to them.

Q: What challenges do you see in the financial services industry that prevent people from saying yes?

Martin:: So, I can empathize very heavily with this industry. I know the people very well. I know Eric very well. I know so many of our customers very well. So, I can empathize with our hesitancy when engaging with new FIs.

It’s been a relentless digital transformation. And we’re talking about community financial institutions; they need substantial teams.
Even you guys, Arizona Financial, could never say you have a substantial team. You’ve got small teams and several factors, including higher acquisition costs, new member costs and fewer products per member cause contracting profitability.

I understand why there’s hesitancy — mobile engagement can sound like just another nice project. It’s not like another magical loan product that will give you magically new loans or another magical deposit product that will magically give you more deposits.

The Future of AI and Personalization in Banking

Q: How does generative AI, if you look at the next two to three years, impact your vision for what Pulsate will be able to do?

Martin: Well, our vision is always around consumer financial success and how we enable financial institutions to make that happen.

So, it’s our passion and my passion to give the financial institution the capabilities to have the individual consumer at the center of their business and to deal with every single consumer in a personal way.

It was super personal at the branch because you would go into it and tell somebody there what you needed. They would give you what you needed and find two or three other products to help you. You built a relationship with the person and it was very personal.

That’s not coming back, but it is still so crucial to this industry and what sets it apart from the tier-one banks and the neo-banks. At Pulsate, our vision and ambition is to give FIs of every size, large and small, the ability to put that customer back at the heart.

Q: What one suggestion would you give to financial institutions to make personalized engagement happen?

Givens: : One suggestion for me equals 10, but I’m kidding. One big one is finding the right partners. Obviously, depending on your size, we have some developers; we don’t have a partial litany of developers.

So, we must ensure that any partner we go in with for anything can integrate with our other partners. Can they integrate with our core system? What about online banking? What about our CRM?

I have found that digitization and moving forward have by far the biggest impact, especially if it’s a startup organization. Who are they going to get bought by? And if a financial partner gets bought, are they going to cease? There’s a lot of fear in a lot of that stuff.

So, vetting through that and seeing and having a game plan: What is your end goal? How do you plan to integrate other systems? And does it make sense that, yes, there’s a great potential partner right here? They have this great product, but you know what, there will be an incredible amount of work to make this work with our vision.

As financial institutions navigate the evolving landscape of customer engagement, the key to success lies in leveraging technology to create meaningful, personalized interactions. By embracing micro-engagements and data-driven strategies, banks and credit unions can build stronger customer relationships and stay competitive in an increasingly digital world.

This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.

For a longer version of this conversation, listen to “How Micro-Engagements Generate Sales and Build Loyalty”, a podcast with Jim Marous, available here. This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Justin Estes is an award-winning writer, strategist, and financial marketing expert with expertise in banking, investments, and fintech. His clients include the NYSE, Franklin Templeton, Credit Karma, Citi and, UBS, and his work has appeared in Forbes, Barrons and ThinkAdvisor as well as The Financial Brand.