The Best Customer Experience Strategy for Banks to Improve CX

banking-experience-improve-cx-in-banking

We all have interacted with a banking institution for one reason or another – whether it’s for personal banking (opening a bank account), technical support, or ebanking services. Having to interact with customer service at a bank is generally not a pleasant experience. But why does the idea of engaging with a bank sound like such an ordeal? Read on.

What is Banking Experience?

What is considered a banking experience? Technically, what qualifies as a finance experience or banking experience?

The Banking Experience (or client experience) is the sum of all interactions a customer perceives along the entire customer journey when interacting with a bank or financial institution. According to Forrester, Customer Experience (CX) is defined as “how customers perceive their interactions with a company.”

Note: The banking experience is not at all the same as a bank asking a potential job candidate about his banking experience, which basically is the same as asking the level of proficiency of the particular candidate in handling customers and delivering an amazing banking customer experience throughout the individual’s career.

(Learn how you can increase your customer retention rate by 22% with these hacks)

Importance of Good Banking Experience

Why is it important to provide a good banking experience? In the modern digital age, customers have lots of options when it comes to choosing a company to invest their hard earned money. Not only that, customer demands have increased with the widespread adoption of technology. This is why banks should improve customer experience for their customers.

Companies who provide an ideal banking experience to their customers increase customer loyalty and satisfaction, with better retention.

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Banking Statistics: Banking Customer Experience Trends

Here, we explore recent customer experience trends in banking with some CX statistics:

  • Omnichannel customer experience is one of the key areas for improvement among banks, according to Ernst & Young Consumer Banking Survey 2014.
  • According to Accenture’s 2016 North American Banking Survey, 87% of consumers will still use their branches in the future.
  • According to McKinsey, improving customer experience increase customers likelihood to renew or buy new products by between 30-50%.
  • According to Google, 46% of people managing their finances online switch between devices before completing the activity, often starting from mobile and switching to PC/tablet.
  • According to Accenture Banking 2020, more than 30% of consumers switched their bank providers in the past six to 12 months due to good competitive pricing, high customer service quality or good value for money. The same report states that 61% of banking customers expect to have access to more online interactions across their entire customer lifecycle.
  • Analysts at Wise Guy suggest the global retail banking market will grow at CAGR 6.08% to 2020.
  • The Capgemini World Retail Banking Report found that banks admitted they had not yet got a grip on the emerging Fintech revolution.
  • Only 37% of customers believe that banks understand their needs and preferences adequately, according to Capgemini.
  • Consumers believe it is important that customer service professionals feel empowered to handle requests on their own without worrying about transfer or escalations, according to American Express.

Best CX Strategy for Banking to Improve CX

Investing and improving customer experience is possibly the best CX strategy for banking institutions. Making customer experience the sole differentiator of your brand will have a major positive impact on your business. Here’s are a series of steps for improving customer experience in banks:

1. Plan

Have a set of defined goals and targets, identify your audience and create campaigns targeting specific audiences with different strategies for each demographic.

2. Strategize

Create a customer experience strategy to achieve your goals and targets.

3. Improve CX

Take action and take proactive measures to design experiences for each of your customer segments.

4. Measure and Refine

Collect data and use a data-driven strategy to take business decisions.

Ideas to Improve Customer Experience in Banks

How to improve CX in banking? What is the best idea to improve CX in banks? People often ask us about ways to improve customer experience in banks or financial organizations. To help you out, here are some really good ideas to improve customer experience in the banking sector:

Make Customer Onboarding Easy

One of the common complaints that customers have about their banking experience is the extensive and time-consuming onboarding formalities. Whether it’s the KYC process, document verification, or something else – it’s taxing. Banks can accelerate customer onboarding by simply doing it virtual i.e. using a Video KYC solution. That way all the OVR verification can be done on a video call at the customer’s convenience.

Offer Omnichannel Customer Support

In this digital age, banks have to be available on the channels that their customers prefer. Provide customer support via mobile banking, net banking, web-chat, live chat, on Facebook, Twitter, and more recently with WhatsApp for banks.

Manage non-business Hours Queries

Don’t miss any customer interaction. Integrate artificially intelligent bots – voicebot or chatbot to cater to your after office hours customer queries. Allow the customer to schedule a callback. This way the customer also does not feel that her/his query is unattended and banks can also get back to them during business hours.

Provide Self-service Options

Don’t make the customer wait in long queues at the bank branch or wait on call to get answers to the routine questions. Allow them to serve themselves with a call center software powered by self-serving IVR, intelligent automatic routing and ACD, etc. Thus, increasing your FCR and customer satisfaction.

Let the Agents have Contextual Conversations

An omnichannel contact center solution allows your customer support executives to view customer’s recent transactions, conversation history, portfolio, etc. Which in turn help them to serve them in an effective manner. At the same time having all the relevant customer information also increases the changes of your telemarketers to increase sales conversion or cross-sell and up-sell.

If you’re looking for ideas to improve customer service, we’ve already got you covered. You’ll also find that most customer service ideas also a
pply to customer experience improvement in the banking industry.

Examples of Good Banking Experience

SNS Bank

SNS Bank, a Netherlands-based retail bank, does not operate like most banks. They have restructured their branches to function as advisory units that serve as a convenient extension of their physical bank branches.

Capital One

Capital One, a retail bank, has a 360 Bank account where customers can set up an unlimited number of online bank accounts with ease, and offers a bird-eye view of all accounts. They even have Capital One Cafes where anyone can spend their leisure time and get banking advice for free.

Sharing Bank

Sharing Bank (Mexico City) provides micro-finance loans to women to help them become independent and earning members of the family. They also provide basic digital education to encourage the use of mobile banking and online transactions.

Banking Experience: Conclusion

If you’re a retail bank or financial institution who’s concerned about the quality of customer experience in your business, FusionCX is your answer to an improved banking experience!

Having a well-equipped contact center is very important to achieve success in the banking sector. Check out Ameyo’s contact center for banking and how it helped! If you’re more interested in debt collection and recovery, we have a great guide on how you can increase debt collection by 200%!

To improve the Banking Experience, RBI has approved the permit for a video-based identification process for KYC. Video KYC will simplify the onboarding and authentication process of customers. Video KYC will save time, improve digital security for the documents and other data, help in improving customer experience as the customers can verify their identity by showing their documents on the Video Camera, and more.