A pronounced shift in the banking scene, from brick and mortar edifices to virtual spaces, begs the remark, “Banks are dead, banking is alive.” Giant strides in technology have brought about a sea change in the way banks function today, with on-the-move, push-of-a-button transactions across geographies and time zones, customer service sans human interactions, and all of this available 24x7x365. Another positive offshoot of this trend is that banks today cater to the literacy-challenged unbanked masses with basic banking services and simultaneously attract high net worth individuals and corporate houses with privileged, elitist offerings, with equal ease.
However, this multi-channel, multi-location, ever present world of banking is not without challenges; information dissemination being one such. How can you ensure timely delivery of appropriate, relevant information to customers in their preferred language? Would you re-create content so as to fit the diverse customer profile, from an urbane smart phone user to a semi-literate rural customer?
The answer is an emphatic NO. What you need is the ability to create content once and reuse it to suit any channel, user, location or need. This is possible only if you plan, manage and strategize your content needs. While there are tools to help manage content, they will not work without adequate groundwork on your need to create, distribute, store, retrieve, archive and destroy content. It is also important to understand the cost of managing content and even more important to understand the cost of NOT doing so.
The need of the hour, therefore, is to have a unified content strategy that straddles multifarious banking scenarios. Each aspect of a unified content strategy will be covered in subsequent posts.
