How Can Banks Improve Their Customer Experience?

Banking is a service based industry, which means that their core offering relies on customer service, and most of their operational activities involve serving and interacting with customers. The success of a bank depends on the sum of the total experiences its employees create for customers.

Today’s customers spend a considerable amount of time researching new products online, eliminating the need to be near a branch or ATM to perform transactions. In fact, most people don’t ever need to go to the bank. And that should be a bank’s cue to integrate online support as a key communication channel.

Banks are now facing competitive pressures from outside the industry to be at least as great as technology vendors such as Amazon, Apple and Google, and are responding to their structural challenges by investing chiefly in FinTech innovation.

Here are some strategies that banks can look into to further improve their customer experience –

1. Secure, speedy and simple digital banking experience

Not all customers are digitally savvy, and it is important for banks to demonstrate new technologies first hand to its customers – for instance, educating customers in using digital channels by gamification methods, which encourages the use of certain features, making it speedy and enjoyable for them. Negative digital experiences are not only frustrating, but time-wasting for busy customers.

In addition, online banking is susceptible to fraud, and banks need to continuously upgrade their IT systems and look for ways to improve security and resilience, following a string of system failures, to improve customers’ confidence in banking with them.

2. Personalised service based on their data

Customers want to personalise their experiences, analyse their transaction and payment data, so they can better manage their money, pay bills and transfer funds. And banks want to sell customers more products. Personalisation features will marry the two objectives, and banks that ignore these trends now will sacrifice online – and possibly mobile – banking customers very soon.

The financial sector has more data collected from each of their customers more than any other industry. Every transaction is a nugget of data which, if pulled together and analysed, can reveal unmatched insights into customers’ needs.

Banks that understand the great competitive advantage big data represents will be able to provide new personalised business models and services, rethink how they enter and expand into new markets, and get a jump on the competition.

3. Improved customer experience at the branch

Before beginning to strategise, banks need to know what shape they are in. Performed internally or with an external consultant, this checkup should measure how well their customers, products, processes and staff performances stack up against the “healthy” voice of customer benchmarks.

Disjointed, complex and manual processes prevent banks from serving customers in a consistent, timely and error-free fashion. A bloated menu of products confuses the customer; a one-size-fits-all pricing menu leaves little room for differentiation. Streamlining processes, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and simplifying the product menu, are the objectives of this exercise. A key effort focused on improving process performance using lean principles can have a dramatic on the customer experience.

There are three priorities to becoming a bank that delivers excellent customer experience – first, take a walk in your customers’ shoes to improve the customer experience as a means of increasing revenue and reducing costs. Second, fix areas where negative experiences are common, because a single negative experience has four to five times greater relative impact than a positive one. And finally, do it now; your customers have even lesser patience for variability in delivery.