How customer experience is reshaping banking

Shifting consumer preferences are a driving force across industries. This is especially true for the financial services sector. Modern consumers expect their bank to mirror the functionality and experience found in the services they use day-to-day such as online shopping, ordering fast-food, and checking traffic or weather..Amid these changes, banks are left with two options: adapt or be left behind. The quality of an institution’s customer experience (CX) plays a key role in building brand loyalty, laying the foundation for long-term relationships and generating revenue.Many institutions, however, find it difficult to provide a consistently positive experience for their customers.According to a report released by Amdocs Studios, only 24 percent of customers feel like their expectations are being met, while 50 percent have no issue switching brands for a better experience, even if it’s more expensive. Consumers heavily influence the pace of industry change, and banking leadership must be proactive in adapting to these changes and closing CX gaps.Customer experience stands as the primary competitive battleground for consumers, sometimes more than a bank’s actual products and service offerings. Across the board, banks and fintechs offer a high degree of product commoditization, with customers having an array of options at their fingertips.Earning and maintaining a customer’s trust sometimes feels like walking a narrow tightrope. Customers carefully evaluate how an institution treats and serves them at every stage of the customer journey and can easily take their business elsewhere if they are dissatisfied.Banks should be aware of three components driving CX:Success Rate: The degree to which customers can accomplish their goals.Effort: The difficulty or ease in accomplishing their goals.Emotion: How customers feel about interactions with their financial institution.Customers need to be successful when interacting with their institution, whether they’re applying for a loan, opening a savings account or cashing a check. These tasks should be easy to accomplish regardless of the complexity, and customers should feel positive about the interaction, website, institution or person who helped them.Negative customer experiences can stem from a poorly designed website with cumbersome navigation or an inability to complete tasks in the channel of their choice. Customers who are repeatedly unsuccessful or find it tedious to accomplish their goals are more likely to have a negative perception of an institution. This can ultimately end the relationship.Closing CX gaps through technologyA digital solution with the necessary detection framework can identify areas that need improvement based on consumer insight and proactive engagement.With the right technology solutions, banks can deliver data-driven recommendations that ensure cohesion across digital and in-person channels. Many banks struggle to realize meaningful CX results from their investment, making a bank’s selection of technology solutions critical in shaping customer engagement and closing gaps.In the past, face-to-face interactions with customers were an industry norm, giving bankers a chance to ask questions, address concerns and determine relevant product needs. The industry’s digital transformation has flipped the script, with automation being necessary to provide this same experience in an omni-channel landscape.Banks must seek solutions with automation equipped to:Fortify revenue drivers — Increase revenue through lead generation, customer acquisition, retention and relationship expansion. Abandonment rates are at an industry high and can be addressed through automated retargeting and campaigns. Additionally, streamlining onboarding optimizes customer engagement, while self-service financial planning tools and educational content help capture previously missed opportunities and engage leads early.Align Omni delivery channels — Growing demand for digital empowerment and easy staff access requires consistency across channels and expanded functionality. Branches can leverage automation-driven universal desktops and contact centers to support an expanded range of customer needs and advisory functions for evolving staff roles. Ultimately, enhancing omni-channel engagement is critical for improving retention and expanding relationships.Detect and mitigate risk — The jump to digital requires expanded best practices for risk, notably in areas such as customer identity, credit risk and attrition. Banks can tackle this issue by moving away from costly underwriting in favor of digital channels with automated underwriting, decisioning and risk-based pricing. With strong risk detection and mitigation capabilities, banks can increase retention by proactively measuring customer satisfaction while protecting current revenue and future growth.Leverage expanded technology — Access to a variety of technology can assist banks on multiple fronts from improving the customer journey experience to detecting and reducing risk, generating leads, streamlining fulfillment and employing analytics to make data-driven decisions.A relentless focus on customer experience is the primary way to sustain competitiveness in a digital-first market, especially as financial services product offerings have become commoditized.Todd Robertson is a senior vice president for ARGO, a Texas-based provider of financial services software solutions.