How to Improve the Customer Experience in Banking

Customer experience is at the forefront of minds within the world of banking, but why has it become a focus for banks?

Competition is heating up between financial institutions. This is due to the mix of new fintech players entering the industry, along with new emergent technologies.

Innovation and improvements need to be a priority for banks to meet the current customer experience demands.

Customers wish to feel valued and confident in their choices in general. With banking it’s no exception.

1.     Customer Feedback

Banks using the feedback they gather from customers is one of the many ways a bank can improve their current customer experience. Customers should expect a high-quality customer experience regardless of the channel chosen.

Collecting feedback from customers regarding the simplicity and ease of use of banking tools such as the app and website are the best ways to understand where the customer experience is lacking.

Getting the balance right between traditional service and self-service should also be a priority for banks.

Similarly, gathering feedback regarding customer service online, in-person or on the phone is a prime way of understanding poor current service performance to ultimately work towards improving the customer experience.

The goal of using this feedback to improve customer experience is to improve customer loyalty. Taking the time to appropriately analyse the customer feedback data could be difference between increasing the customer satisfaction score or creating an at-risk customer.

2.     Employee Feedback

Employees are still the face of any bank, regardless of how often customers bank online.

Irish banking research shows that customers are happy to conduct banking online. However, over half still think that 24-hour access to human contact at banks is important.

With this, employees should be considered a crucial element of banking customer experience.

Employees are critical to delivering good customer experience within bank branches and through customer service queries. Banks need to capture the employee feedback to see what barriers they have when it comes to delivering a good customer experience.

Customers want employees to have the answers to their queries. It’s up to management to ensure they have these answers so that they can provide customers with the best customer experience.

3.     Single customer view

A Single Customer View (SCV) is an aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data held by an organisation about its customers that can be viewed in one place.

With a Single Customer View banks can use the improved perspective of customers and manage the customer journeys to improve personalisation strategies.

Ultimately it provides an organisation with a 360-degree view of its customers. While it’s not easy to achieve, it greatly aids the process of mapping out the full customer journey, which can be used to identify customer characteristics to inform future decisions.

It can also help identify at-risk customers. This allows banks to engage on a personal level to salvage relationships and reduce churn rates.

The result is banks being able to make predictions based on the current data and in turn, delivering a better customer experience.

4.     Financial Technology

Recently there has been an increasing amount of start-up fintech companies. Due to this, traditional banks need to keep up with the technological advancements in the industry.

With a large majority of banking customers owning a smartphone and having an internet connection at home, it’s important that banks collect the feedback about their experience with online banking.

The bank website and app where customers access the bank’s remote features should be a positive experience.

Opportunities are introduced through new payment options becoming available such as contactless on debit/credit cards, Apple Pay and Android Pay.

Banks can meet the expectations consumers have that their bank will have these features to make spending more convenient.

When it comes to employing any customer experience strategy in the financial industry, trust and loyalty must be prioritised. With a positive customer experience comes loyalty and an improved trust relationship between a bank and its customers.

Do you wish to find a customer experience strategy that best suits your company’s needs? Be sure to contact us today on +353 1 8041298!

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