How Financial Services Enhance Customer Experience?

This piece was originally published on the PEX Network. 

Managing customer experience has become a priority for every banking and financial leader in current digital age. 79 per cent of banking, insurance, and fintech CEOs believe customer expectations are shaped by hyper-relevant, real-time and dynamic experience encountered across the industry. The emergence of new digital technologies and changing customer behavior has contributed immensely in focusing on customer experience in the banking industry.

Read more Customer Experience Predictions Report: 2022

How can digital financial services contribute towards the digital future?

Accessing financial services using digital technology is known as Fintech. Millions of people are accessing these services at the global scale. Handling the financial tasks for millions of people have become so easy that they can access their banks from the phone. Customers can earn money, spend money, and can save or invest money as and when they want on the device of their preference, and this offers greater choice and convenience.

Emergence of new threats

The digital revolution has had a significant impact on the banking and financial services industry. Earlier banks operated as financial intermediaries relying on brick and mortar branches to engage with their customers and thereby earned their profits. However, post digital revolution, this traditional model is disrupted by digital innovators. FinTech firms emerged as new competitors for traditional banks by offering innovative ways of delivering financial solutions. Technology firms like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon also made forays in the financial services industry, offering alternative financial solutions.

Read more: Digital Customer Experience Report 2021

Changing customer behavior in the digital era

There has been a symbolic shift in customer preferences and behavior in the present digital age due to the rapid expansion of mobile and internet connectivity. Customers want relevant advice and product information at their fingertips as they go about their daily lives. Most customers are less likely to care about the channel they use to communicate with their financial services provider. Customers want quick and easy access to service offerings. Customers are not only embracing a do-it-yourself (DIY) model - they are also demanding it.

Current state of customer experience

1. Redesigning the operating model

Banks have responded to these threats from digital innovators and changes in customer behavior by redesigning their operating model leveraging digital platform solutions. They have started offering products across multiple channels in anticipation to meet customer demands. But there is a fundamental problem with this product or channel-centric view of the banks. These omni-channel digital offerings have radically changed the way banks engage with their customers and they have far deeper ramifications on the overall customer experience.

2. Multiple offerings across channels and limited offerings within a channel

Today clients experience a wide variety of service levels across different channels. While there is a spectrum of offerings across different channels, ironically clients have limited choices within a channel. They often find themselves caught in a hapless situation during inter-department handoffs.

3. Information overload

Moreover, clients get overwhelmed by technological features and lose sight of the core product offering. Although clients are inundated with data and notifications, they are not aware of the information they are seeking.

Read more: Industry choice: 10 CX Leaders in Financial Services 

Current state issues impacting customers

Currently, various issues affect a customer’s journey adversely. Some of the issues and their impact on the customers are:

• Complex and confusing paths are making the customer journey susceptible to misinterpretation.
• Repetitive and redundant steps are making the customer journey frustrating.
• Limited ability to monitor and track requests are making customer anxious.
• Channels and departments operating in silos focusing on individual KPIs are not aligning with the end-customer’s expectation.
• Benefits of faster turn around and better service quality at individual touch points are getting forfeited due to delays at inter-department handoffs.
• Failure demand or missing SLAs are resulting in bitter customer experience.

These harrowing journeys contribute to unpleasant customer experiences and eventually results in customer churn. There is, therefore, an urgent need for banks to revisit their existing customer journey and take mitigating measures to transform the customer experience.

What is customer journey?

Customer journey map is a diagram or a group of diagrams that displays all the levels through which customer goes through throughout his/her entire interaction with the brand.

Why is Customer journey mapping important?

To understand the customer experience, banks need to take a holistic view of end-to-end customer journey from an end-customer perspective. Customer experience is an aggregation of all the interactions a customer has throughout their lifecycle with the organization. Hence, organizations need to focus on a customer’s cumulative experience across multiple touch points and channel over time. Banks need to avoid driving disassociated improvement initiatives at individual department levels. Analyzing end-to-end customer journeys cutting across different departments will enable banks to uncover the root cause of the customer dissatisfaction and define expected outcomes.

Holistic customer experience strategy: Service Blueprinting

Service Blueprinting is an excellent toolkit that banks can utilize to analyze customer journeys and create a distinctive and satisfying customer experience. Service Blueprinting is a customer-focused approach to map the customer journey. In this approach, processes that constitute customer journey are graphically depicted along with a sequence of user actions, service response and touch points that enables service relationship.

The following steps outline an approach to mapping customer journey utilizing Service Blueprinting:

1. Establish Goal: Determine the goal of the Service Blueprinting and define the scope of the customer journey of the service offering.

2. Identify Personas: Identify different personas (representative user type) from the customer population. Define attributes, behavior, needs, and expectations of each persona.

3. Map customer journey: Map end to end-customer journey for the identified persona from end customer perspective. Include user actions and service response from onstage and backstage staff at different stages of the customer journey. Capture the customer’s state of mind along the customer journey.

4. Identify Gap: Determine customer satisfaction level across different stages of the customer journey. Discover gaps between actual and expected customer experience and their associated reasons.

5. Optimize Journey: Simplify and streamline the customer journey. Prioritize actions based on the gap in customer satisfaction and relative customer importance.

6. Enhance Experience: Gather customer insights from the customer journey maps. Design solutions and interfaces to enhance customer experience and empower customer.

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Read More: Why X-Data is Key to Breaking Through in the Experience Economy

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