Why Improving the Customer Experience is the Latest Industry Trend

Perhaps you’ve noticed a driving theme across the financial services industry to innovate and improve the customer experience. While the path to achieving the goal varies greatly—from using artificial intelligence to personalize the experience to implementing a single platform—winning the experience and efficiency game comes down to one simple mission: create an enjoyable customer experience.

Everyone watched as this transformation, led by user experience, disrupted industries like e-commerce and entertainment. Companies like Amazon and Netflix have been ahead of the curve in delivering superior experiences to their customers, which often has not just been because they offer a great user experience, but also because of logistical excellence. Today, offering a personalized experience and real-time services across any device is the new normal.

In fact, recent data confirms this expectation even in financial services, according to Barlow Research Associates Inc. Customers cite that a primary driver for working with a bank is often based on how easy the bank is to do business with. Furthermore, customers expect the same seamless and easy-to-use digital interaction with their bank as they do while ordering an Uber, for instance.

The Single Platform Difference
With the rise of financial technology (fintech), there is no shortage of vendors providing an assortment of solutions to help financial institutions offer an improved customer experience. Unfortunately, some banks and credit unions have found themselves with more headaches than enhancements when multiple vendor solutions are implemented across the institution.

Disparate systems often lead to data siloes, expensive integration projects and increased overhead in due diligence and security monitoring. The seamless, multi-channel experience customers want is thrown out the window when multiple, separate systems are implemented and expected to work together, and rarely do.

A single-platform solution has become a strategic imperative to overcome many of the issues associated with disparate systems. With one system managing all channels, banks and credit unions can deliver a unified experience while reducing operational inefficiencies. This is a clear need as more than half of financial institutions customers don’t believe that the digital channel of a bank can service all their needs, recent research data shows.

However, transforming the customer experience doesn’t just mean introducing a slick user interface; back-office processes must also be efficient and meet the real-time demands of customers. There is almost a 50 percent abandonment rate of banking customers starting a process online and then finishing at a branch, according to the 2017 Account Opening and Onboarding Benchmarking Study. This is likely due to another fact: less than 20 percent of financial institutions have implemented an end-to-end process to date.

Streamlining customer and employee interactions within a financial institution to drive increased efficiency, transparency, profitability and regulatory compliance across all lines of business is essential in order to drive a superior customer experience. Regardless of the originating channel, a customer should receive:

• Transparency into banking processes
• Convenient access to status updates and document sharing
• Personalized, seamless customer experience
• Digital/mobile-enabled access

Where to Begin
Consider these three areas for ensuring a successful transformation.

1. Plan the journey before you begin. In order to establish a vision to guide the entire organization (or even a line of business), it’s imperative to first understand the journey customers go through when interacting with the institution. This involves considering customers’ emotions, and the cause for those emotions. Dig into these areas while exploring the customer journey to improve the experience.
2. Pick one product or line of business and take it end-to-end. Many institutions, while taking the correct path of not just implementing a slick user interface, end up trying to take on more digital transformation than they are ready for. Instead of trying to transform the whole bank or department all at once, greater success is often met by starting with a single product, like a secured small business loan, and transforming that experience end-to-end.
3. Finally, release then iterate. Starting with a single product or a particular line of business provides the opportunity to test and perfect. The iterative process is important not just to improving the customer experience, but also to ensuring that any needed operating model adjustments can be properly vetted.

As technology giants like Amazon continue to push the bounds of customer expectations, it can at times feel daunting to try to make these shifts at your own institution. However, as customer demands for seamless digital experiences grow and become even more a part of the buying decision, the emphasis on a single platform to help deliver both an exceptional experience and logistical excellence is even more pronounced. This growing demand marks the importance and urgency of employing a strategy that focuses on delivering a delightful customer experience from the first interaction all the way to the back office.