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Continuously evolving landscape, cutting-edge competition, and rising customer expectations have become a general thumb rule to adapt to in almost every industry including banking & financial institutions. This is why many insurance banking service providers must keep up with effective ways to improve their customer experience.
The customer experience (CX) in banking is an important aspect of every strategic approach to meet the demands of their customers. Banks and financial institutions need to be digitally transformed to deliver a consistent banking experience whether it is online or retail.
Digital banking allows personalization at the scale that drives between 5 and 15% revenue growth for companies in the financial services sectors.
Banks functioning digitally have witnessed reduced costs and streamlined processes. This end-to-end integration also helps provide an engaging customer experience in financial services and allows business transformation with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The customer experience (CX) in banking refers to all the efforts you put into making every client feel important when they are interacting with your bank. It is also the cumulation of all the interactions that a customer perceives along the entire journey.
Digital Banking Report has found that “improving the customer experience in banking” should be the first goal for banking institutions and financial service providers.
Banks that invest in the customer experience trends have higher rates of recommendation, greater wallet share, and are more likely to up-sell or cross-sell products and services to existing customers.
Delivering an excellent customer experience is crucial for the financial services industry. Poor service & financial advice emerged as the top reasons why people leave their banks and credit unions. Addressing poor customer experience could be much more impactful in the long term. Banks should adopt effective strategies to revamp the banking & financial services experience.
CX has reached a level of paramount importance in recent years, and customers no longer view their experiences in an industry silo. They expect that banks should focus on creating an experience culture that nurtures their needs, builds trust, is personalized, and exceeds their expectations.
The key customer expectations when it comes to digitized banking experience are:
In today’s banking market, customer experience is a rough landscape for financial institutions to navigate with all of the requirements of the digital transformation era. So, what can be done when digital banking CX challenges are escalating every day?
We have tailored eight startegies to implement digital customer experience in banking. Let’s dive in:
Innovation in data collection, analytics, and channel strategies has enabled financial institutions to diversify means of engaging customers, and building better relationships through real-time assistance.
While helping customers avail opportunities faster than ever and minimizing their risks, banks and financial service providers will be able to provide effective insights instead of sticking with location-based offers.
How proactive customer engagement helps banks?
Mapping your banking customer journey is an excellent way to gain a detailed understanding of your customer’s experience. It can help banks:
Understanding the banking customer journey mapping, helps banks to provide consistent and excellent customer service no matter what touchpoint your customer uses. Based on customer problems, you can offer live assistance with advanced tools like co-browsing and video chat.
REVE Chat offers a complete suite of visual engagement tools that help to collaborate with customers in real-time and deliver a personalized first response. Sign up today and allow your business to deliver real-time banking support.
By using visual customer engagement, banks can provide faster solutions to their customers in real-time. Bank can also gain additional benefits such as:
ICICI bank is a great example of improving customer experience in banking. By using the advanced co-browsing solution, the bank has:
One of the key aspects that has a direct impact on customer experience is real-time help. Gartner says, “85% of banks and businesses will perform customer engagement with the help of AI chatbots by 2023.”
A chatbot is the best channel banks can use to automate their simple and routine tasks (knowing account balance, outstanding credit card amount, how to change the address, etc.) where human involvement is not needed. You can educate your bots to handle conversations appropriately and match with their language style or convenient time.
When bots are used rightly, they reduce the number of support requests and improve team efficiency.
Here are some potential use cases of chatbots used in the banks:
Nina, an AI assistant built by Swedbank, is designed to deliver an intuitive, automated experience for all your digital channels by engaging your customers in natural conversations using voice or text. The bank reports of the 40,000 conversations a month that Nina bot handles, resolve 81% of the issues.
Modern customers prefer to connect with brands across different channels. They can perform the same banking operations, whether they use a website, a mobile app, a call center, a bank’s branch, or any other channel.
Studies show digital channels gain insignificance yearly, but nearly 50% of customers want to have branch services as well.
It means that superior customer service in banking is about delivering the same quality of service across all channels, both online and offline.
Providing omnichannel banking customer experience is about making a similar set of services available to the customers across all the channels, both digital and offline.
The actual omnichannel banking platform also allows real-time data synchronization between different channels. For instance, customers can start the onboarding process with one channel and finish it with another, without the need to provide the same data over and over again.
Creating an unrivaled customer experience is an aspiration of today’s banks but how to achieve this? By having an end-to-end customer journey.
It is the roadmap of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. It may go on long after customers have signed up for a new account or purchased a product.
Once the journey map has been established, it’s time to determine:
Customer needs, motivations, actions, and barriers to action should be considered at each stage of the customer journey. What motivated that persona to perform that action for instance? What would motivate them to move to the next stage of the journey? What obstacles might they face?
Understanding your customer journey in banking is essential to delivering an excellent experience.
Understanding customers is the foundation for a sustainable competitive advantage in the digital banking experience.
Improving the retail banking experience requires truly understanding your customers and relating to them in ways that they understand. This includes taking a 360-degree view of your banking customer and leveraging the data available.
Big data analytics is a vital ingredient in enhancing financial services experience and making crucial business decisions. The rising fluctuations in customer needs bring in the vitality of leveraging big data analytics to gain deep insights into the same.
With the help of analytics, banks can gain insights to segment customers, evaluate opportunities, and predict models to strengthen engagements and increase the customer experience of digitalized banking services.
One important analytics use case is the experience provided by Personal Financial Management (PFM) solutions. From primitively classifying account transactions into buckets, PFM has come a long way, and current solutions use comparative insights based on consumer history, attitude, and behavior extensively to provide personalized financial advice.
Personalization is imperative. Everything boils down to delivering value to customers. Understanding customer needs is a vital element for banks to deliver personalized service.
Banks will have to use both physical and virtual channels to deliver banking services as well as financial advice to their customers in the most convenient manner. The approach they need to follow should be a combination of cost-efficient as well as improved banking experience.
The below image shows the impact of personalized services.
Here are some best practices for banks to follow to deliver personalized services:
Further, the customer experience provided through these channels needs to be consistent and seamless. In order to achieve this, banks and financial institutions should invest in the IT systems of the latest technology.
Forbes says, “customers want to feel valued, appreciated, and confident, and 90% of customers who feel valued will advocate for the brand.”
Using the major customer experience tools such as maintaining transparency about your service policies, and terms & conditions, and offering security to the financial details, builds deep trust, and cultivates loyalty in customers.
They move ahead to recommend your products and services to others and they return to you for new services, providing more value to your business.
NGDATA’s annual Consumer Banking Survey found that consumers have increasingly high expectations and demand exceptional customer support from banks in exchange for their loyalty. It means that banks and financial institutions must accelerate digital technologies to create good digital transformation examples across their organizations so that they have the tools to become fully customer-centric.
Customers must be at the center of their entire architecture and meet the raised expectations for service providers. Here are some key considerations why retail banking CX is a top priority:
The largest bank in India, State Bank of India has launched YONO (You Only Need One), a fully digital banking platform to address customers’ financial and lifestyle requirements. YONO includes a digital bank where customers can do all banking, payments, and other non-financial banking transactions.
Huge shifts in consumers’ expectations are transforming the way people interact with their banking providers. “Performance Against Customer Expectations”(PACE) report highlights a number of key practices that reflect just how quickly the banking industry is changing.
Here are five key components for customer engagement in banking:
FIS Consumer Banking Report says, “72% of all bank interactions are digital”. People are banking on their mobile devices more than they use any other retail delivery channel, including desktop PCs, ATMs, or physical branches. A poorly performing mobile application is just enough to turn off potential new customers, something no bank can afford. It is time to focus on the improvement of the mobile application data to stay in the race.
Customers seeking financial advice land on the sites and end up getting confused about how to use the comprehensive instructions practically. Banks can make the best use of such opportunities to improve the financial services customer experience. With the help of CRM technology, you can collect and analyze data to create customer profiles that can help financial experts get an end-to-end view of customer queries.
Nowadays, customers rarely visit physical branches but it does not mean that it should be ignored. To match the competition of internet banking and boost customer experience it is essential that the brick & mortar serves a similar way as internet banking. Physical banks have capitalized on the value where customers can seek consultative services and learn to use technology. Keeping simple – customers doing Internet banking should avail of similar functionalities, self-service options, and advanced technology so that they have a hyper-personalized banking experience.
Long hold time for getting the query answered is one of the frustrating scenarios for customers. AI-enabled chatbots are the perfect way to overcome this customer service challenge in the banking sector. Bots can engage customers 24×7 in a conversation way to answer FAQs. This improves response time and reduces the number of support requests.
Emma from OCBC is a good example of a trend that sees banks turning boys into helpful acquisition and lead-generation engines. The Emma bot is built for home and renovation loans and guides customers and prospects via a conversational approach. It collects the user details and forwards them to the mortgage expert to offer a personalized customer experience. Apart from this, AI is being used for conversational banking to deliver a better experience.
By understanding the different areas of customer experience, you can come up with an extensive customer engagement strategy to reduce the gaps between customers and your bank. The significance of the digital banking experience can be attributed to its various benefits like reduced operational costs, retaining customers, and staying ahead of competitors by using the latest technologies.
In a nutshell, the customer experience in the banking ecosphere holds massive untapped potential for growth, from meeting the day-to-day needs of consumers and focusing on preparing for disruptive future technologies. Also, signing up with REVE Chat helps to act as a catalyst to deliver a better customer experience in banking.
You can also look over: 9 Most Important Banking Customer Experience Trends
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