Pre-qualification

Adding pre-approved products to your customer journey needs to be fast and as automated as possible. The best tools will gather all the data required and make decisions in real-time, allowing you to place pre-qualified offers in front of the customer as quickly as possible. Experian’s solutions are designed to allow customers to see what they may be able to afford without requiring them to go through a credit application process first.

In the absence of a full credit check, the best way to obtain the insight you need about your prospect is through shared financial data. For instance, you could pair your data with records from other sources, particularly those derived from credit bureaus. These provide a data-sharing hub for lenders worldwide. Experian’s solutions can connect you to more than 70 global bureaus to provide a more complete picture of an individual’s finances.

Confirming eligibility for products is one thing, knowing which products are most likely to appeal to your prospect is another. Choose a decisioning tool that’s capable of linking prospects to products that are most likely to be of interest. Experian’s PowerCurve platform offers this functionality through its new Eligibility Check product, which taps into Experian’s data and analytics to make strong recommendations.

Once you’ve developed an idea of your customer's financial needs, how do you balance those with your business strategy to determine which offers to make? One option is to let mathematical decisioning software do the heavy lifting for you. For example, Experian MarketSwitch Optimisation can automatically evaluate a variety of different priorities – from competing business goals to individual customer needs – before calculating the impact of every possible decision to determine which products to offer based on your appetite for risk.

Shared banking data can provide a snapshot of your customers’ finances in real-time, but make sure you pick a solution that gives you access to historical data too, as this will enable you to paint a more complete picture of their credit and payment record. Experian’s Credit 3D lets you view up to 72 months of key data, for example.

Once you’ve determined a customer’s basic eligibility, it’s time to look beyond their basic financial picture to better understand the person. Creating such a universal view requires more than access to additional data – you need to be able to extract the key information to determine which pre-approved products and services might appeal to them. Credit 3D combines machine learning and data science with predictive analytics modelling tools to deliver this insight direct to your screen.

While you can never guarantee a customer will be able to pay back their debt – after all, what may be affordable now may not be if their circumstances change – you can at least use smart predictive modelling to gauge their likely long-term value to your business. Credit 3D provides all this plus a dedicated consultancy team to help you maximise the insights available.

The last few years have proved how difficult it is to predict the future with any degree of accuracy using only the past as a guide. Thankfully, updating your strategies is straightforward using smart machine learning. Consider a platform like Experian’s Ascend Intelligence Services, which can both validate your current models and, if necessary, replace them with a fully built, deployed and tested version to ensure your pre-qualified offers don’t stray beyond your risk appetite.

The democratisation of data, led by open banking, has revolutionised organisations can engage with their customers. Now digital means personalising their experience so that they only see what is relevant to them and their needs. This is where harnessing the power of shared data through tools like Experian’s Credit 3D pays dividends as it enables you to build a complete view of your customer.

The obvious way to smooth your customer journey is to identify friction points and look for ways to remove them. Two steps in the journey that often cause issues are verifying identities and assessing affordability, especially if these still rely on laborious manual checks. The simplest way to smooth over these rough points is to integrate external data into your systems that can automate these checks.

The greater your customer understanding, the more you can do to personalise your pre-qualified offers. Choose a scorecard system that can feed into information supplied by customers themselves. For example, Experian's Delphi for New Business can incorporate credit-report data volunteered by customers who’ve signed up for Experian Boost.

The quicker you can verify your customer’s details and assess their eligibility for your products, the better. Experian’s tools come with the added bonus of inserting pre-qualified deals early into the applications process, which in turn gives your applicants more impetus to complete the journey.

Social media offers a great way to reach people looking for credit. Smart advertising solutions enable you to link prospects via their social media ID to a choice of contact methods. For example, Click for Credit can link to a chatbot or Experian’s market-leading pre-qualification process that will then steer them towards products and services of interest.

Once you’ve tempted people to take up your offer, you need to make sure those offers remain visible during the applications process. Experian’s PowerCurve Originations customer acquisition platform combines your data with other sources to allow its automated tools to make informed decisions about the products a customer sees. 

A customer who is looking to purchase one type of product can sometimes be tempted to buy a second one. By incorporating pre-qualified offers for complimentary items you can provide more value for your customer and potentially extra business for you too. For example, you could promote house insurance during a mortgage application process.