Sherri Schwartz is the Head of Marketing at OvationCXM, a global leader in customer experience management (CXM).
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For years, if you polled financial service executives on their top priorities for the next year, “digital transformation” would likely have been in the top five—and it still seems to be. According to Cornerstone Advisors’ 2022 “What’s Going On In Banking” study—which surveyed 300 senior executives at U.S.-based midsize financial institutions in December 2021—over half of both credit unions and banks had launched digital transformation initiatives as of 2021. Of those that launched strategies in 2020, most are at least halfway done. So what happens when these institutions are finished? Does that mean they are caught up? Or rather, did they only finish deploying the latest tools of yesterday?
While digital transformation has made it easier for financial institutions to meet customer expectations, it hasn’t necessarily improved the customer experience. It’s notoriously taken years to finish transformation projects and cost millions of dollars, and the institutions’ perceptions of how much they’ve improved their transformation journeys don’t necessarily correlate to what their customers are experiencing.
According to Forrester, customer trust in banks fell in 2022—the first time in four years. Technology has the power to streamline financial support and servicing, but without an emphasis on delivering an exceptional customer experience, how can financial institutions build or even maintain relationships with their customers?
What are customers saying?
In OvationCXM’s 2022 “Financial Services CXM Impact Report,” we surveyed more than 4,000 business owners to discover significant pain points they experienced during financial product and service onboarding, support and servicing. While most business banking clients are generally satisfied with their financial institution, they reported significant frustrations regarding their onboarding, servicing and support journeys. Six in 10 business owners described their most recent onboarding experience as “somewhat difficult” or “extremely difficult.”
Seventy-six percent admitted they walked away in the middle of onboarding because the process was too complicated and, as a result, never even used the product or service they signed up for. Respondents pointed to confusing instructions and difficulty finding necessary information.
Unfortunately, issues are rarely resolved in a single contact. Of those we surveyed, 70% said it took two or more contacts to solve their issues, while one-third said it took four or more. Businesses in search of financial services should get help quickly. If their concerns aren’t resolved quickly, customers will likely be a challenge to retain.
While expanding your tech ecosystem will bring more benefits, it may also lead to more third-party providers, multiple technologies and frequent handoffs between teams. This can lead to disjointed experiences as customers directly feel the effects of the chaos.
How can financial institutions improve the customer experience?
Institutions need to be aware that onboarding is one of the first impressions they make; the quality of customers’ experience with it will directly impact customer satisfaction and retention. If the customer cannot make it past the first step without friction, how can they trust their financial institution throughout the rest of the relationship? Financial institutions should provide cohesive, less complicated customer journeys so they know how they’re doing, what’s next and where to quickly find help.
Organizations may think that their existing digital transformation initiatives have solved the customer experience; however, some of them may have created more complexities as years of incorporating siloed new tools and third-party ecosystem partners created information locked in different systems, communication breakdowns and fractured customer journeys. To transform the customer experience, financial institutions should prioritize breaking down silos and expanding visibility, collaboration and communication before customers become frustrated and leave.
Before seeking out a solution, institutions should first diagnose where the problems occur within their customers’ experiences. Holding a journey-mapping session is the first and most critical step to success. Before this point, you will have already understood that you have a churn and attrition problem. Or, through customer surveys, you may have learned that you have an NPS or customer dissatisfaction issue. Now is the time to solve it. Journey mapping is the first step to unlocking where your visibility bottlenecks are. Map out the life cycle of your customer journeys and experiences with your organization. What are the tasks and stages within the journeys? Where are the visibility gaps? Where are the drop-off points where information leaves your system and goes to one of your third-party partners? Uncover the areas where risks and caution tape lie.
Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed the birth of a new industry, customer experience management (CXM). CXM focuses on bringing an institution’s existing internal tools, third-party ecosystem partners, process automation, journey orchestration and communication channels together to connect seamlessly through one platform to remove breaking points in a customer’s journey.
After journey mapping sessions, it’s important to reevaluate your existing tech stack limitations. This will show you where there are visibility gaps that are caused by internal and external partner platform disconnects that impair optimal CXs. Then, you can look for a solution that addresses those specific gaps. When looking for a solution, you should also consider the following:
1. Ensure that any solution you’re considering has pre-built connectors to your existing tools so that you can turn on the optimal CX quickly. (It will also cut down on the costs of building custom integrations and year-long implementation processes.)
2. Ask providers about their product’s journey design and orchestration capabilities. What personalization features do you need, and can the provider accommodate those? Alternately, perhaps you only need a few specific journeys and don’t require a great deal of personalization.
At the end of the day, your goal and priority must be to fix the CX quickly. Institutions should rethink and reprioritize to put customer experiences front and center. There is no lower-cost position in any industry than a satisfied customer—period. You’ve got to hang on to the ones you’ve got, and the really good, customer-centric businesses will likely increase their share of their business in the customer bases they’re serving today by winning on CX in 2023.
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