Revolutionizing Banking: Terragni Consulting’s Neuroscience and Behavioral Science-Driven Customer Engagement Strategies
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Dr. Anil Pillai, Director, of Terragni Consulting.
- Terragni Consulting has pioneered Consumer Neuroscience and behavioural science-based strategies in India. How have these approaches specifically impacted customer engagement in the banking sector?
ANS: The integration of consumer neuroscience and behavioural science has revolutionized customer engagement in the Indian banking sector. By understanding how customers think and feel, banks have been able to build trust, simplify decision-making, and create deeply personalized experiences. These strategies are especially impactful in a diverse market like India, where cultural nuances and economic diversity require tailored approaches to engagement. In India, the convergence of consumer neuroscience (the study of brain responses to marketing stimuli) and behavioural science (understanding human decision-making) has significantly influenced customer engagement in the banking sector. This impact is particularly evident in our client banks and financial institutions who tailor their products, services, and customer interactions to align with human psychology and emotional triggers.
Some specific impact areas where Terragni has played a role:
- Behavioural Strategies for HNI, Rurban, and B-B Banking
- Behavioural Design in Loan Offerings
- Friction Reduction and building Empathy and Trust
- Contextualization and Personalization Using Experiential Segmentation
- Enhancing Digital Banking Experiences
2. Banks have traditionally relied on transactional interactions. How has Terragni helped reimagine these into personalized, emotionally resonant customer journeys?
ANS: For banks to transform routine transactional interactions into deeply engaging, emotionally resonant experiences, they must shift their focus from merely facilitating transactions to building relationships. This is what partnering with Terragni delivers.
We focus on :
- Contextualizing the journey to the experiential needs of a given customer. How a young, fresh on-the-job professional interacts on a journey is vastly different from a young second-generation business owner. Both are seemingly very similar, in age, education, and hobbies -in short, all the “outward” markers of a profile. But their contexts are vastly different and hence experiential desires and drivers are different too.
- With Contextualizing comes “Humanizing”. Designing journeys with “true” empathy. What is “true empathy”? It is when the bank exhibits a deep understanding of the context, and the problem and then goes on to solve the customer’s problem. Not just listening to a problem and profusely apologizing and then sending a set of movie tickets as an apology.
- Designing for Simplicity and Trust
Remove friction from processes, build transparency, and introduce moments of unexpected joy. This drives Simplicity, which in turn drives Trust. Merely making processes faster or with fewer steps is NOT eliminating friction. That, at best, is part of the task.
The real challenge lies in eliminating cognitive and perceived friction.
3. Behavioural insights are central to your solutions. Could you elaborate on how these insights have been applied to predict and influence customer decisions in financial services?
ANS: Designing behaviours starts with deep insights. Such insights do not come from merely asking questions and then ranking the answers on a Likert scale. Terragni uses a model that we call,” The Sensemaker”. The Sensemaker methodology uses a multi-modal approach to insight gathering, where we use Data of multiple hues, standard qualitative methods, secondary/domain research, our internal bank of insights, consumer neuroscience, ethnography, and a very unique method of interviewing techniques, borrowing heavily from the field of Psychiatry. All this put together, triangulated, helps us arrive at the set of insights that we build on to drive solutions.
4. Your work in the banking sector has led to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Can you share a case study or specific example that highlights these results?
ANS: A stellar example of our work in the banking sector is our partnership with one of India’s top three banks, to tackle customer churn in their personal loans segment. Facing a churn rate of over 37% and significant friction during customer interactions, the bank needed a deeper understanding of customer motivations and pain.
Using our expertise in Behaviour science and Consumer neuroscience, we uncovered key insights, the most crucial one being how customers viewed the loans as a transactional commodity and experienced cognitive friction and emotional distress during post-purchase phases.
By categorizing their customers based on differential contexts of disbursal urgency and income category, we identified 4 experiential segments that helped the bank implement targeted engagement strategies, improve communication, and transparency, and reduce customer stress.
The result? Increased customer engagement, higher retention rates, and reduced operational costs, driving long-term loyalty and profitability in an intensely competitive and commoditized market.
5. Banks often face challenges balancing regulatory compliance with innovative strategies. How does Terragni address these complexities when designing experiential solutions?
ANS: There are two parts to this. Very rarely have we seen, at least in banking, (unlike say, Insurance), the regulator-RBI, impeding customer and market-led innovations. The challenge, if one may call it so, lies with the banks rather than the regulator.
Secondly, if indeed there is some friction in the customer journey, which is present as a result of regulation ( like KYC for instance), customers do understand if explained in a manner that’s devoid of jargon.
6. How do your proprietary platforms, such as EAS and Magic Box, help banks analyze behavioural patterns to create more effective engagement strategies?
ANS: One of the biggest barriers to empathetic, transparent, trust-based banking is friction. At Terragni, it is our life mission to create simple, frictionless experiences and journeys for EACH customer context. Now, Friction is a rather complex concept. It suffers from what is known as the “illusion of explanatory depth” The term Friction is so commonplace that each of us believes we know what it means and since we know the definition, we know how to spot it and eliminate it. Nothing could be further than the truth. Else why would we all have so much grief and complexity when dealing with our chosen brands? EAS as a platform is focused on identifying, grading, and eliminating the 4 distinct types of friction with actionable implementation roadmaps.
7. The financial services industry is increasingly competitive. How does Terragni’s neuroscience-driven approach give banks a distinct edge in retaining and growing their customer base?
ANS: By understanding customers’ unique contextual drivers and barriers, we create experiences that are more aligned with their needs. We focus on eliminating friction at every touchpoint and process, ensuring seamless, hassle-free journeys for customers. Additionally, we design and implement behavioural nudges to guide customers toward making desirable choices, enhancing their engagement. This approach helps banks build stronger relationships, improve retention, and ultimately grow their customer base.
8. As banks cater to both tech-savvy and traditional customer segments, how does your interdisciplinary approach ensure inclusivity in engagement strategies?
ANS: Simple answer: Via contextualization and understanding of human behaviour, emotions, and irrationality.
9. With AI and digital adoption growing in the banking sector, how does Terragni integrate these technologies with behavioural and neuroscience insights to enhance customer experiences?
ANS: As multiple LLMs start maturing, Terragni does deploy significant embedded AI capability in our insight engine. We believe, however, that these are still early days and the firepower of what AI can and should deliver is yet to come. We are deeply invested here and are watching this space closely.
10. Looking ahead, what role do you see behavioural science and neuroscience playing in shaping the future of customer engagement in banking, and how is Terragni preparing for this evolution?
ANS: Terragni embarked on the usage of scalable consumer neuroscience way ahead of the curve, it has been almost a decade now. We are not preparing for the evolution. We are driving the evolution.
