Customer experience in banking today highlights the dramatic ways in which banks are adapting to meet the requirements of the digital age. Based on Go-Live Faster’s expertise in helping several banks go live on time with their desired customer experience, here are some of the top best practices that can help banks deliver a great experience.
How can Banks reorient to create a winning Customer Experience?
Over the last few decades, banks have seen a transformational shift from being a classical lending/borrowing system to a digitally modern and operationally agile institution. Although banks have undergone a technological change, the core objective of most banks is a business transformation driven by customer-centricity. Banks are rapidly adopting a digital-first approach to revolutionize customer engagement across all banking channels. More than just implementing a new product, committing to customer experience means long-term sustainable growth for banks. It’s inevitably true that customer experience is linked to operational excellence, which means making interactions seamless at every stage; a poor customer experience can irrevocably damage the value for banks. With the growing popularity of Fintech behemoths, banks are at risk of losing control over their customers. As Fintechs continue to lead innovation in the banking industry, they will always be gunning for bank customers. For banks, creating a brand that is perceived to be customer-centric and one which offers better value can be a game-changer.
Focusing on Usability
While banks are trying hard to forge ahead in the digital race by rolling out more products and features faster, they often forget in the end everything revolves around its usability. Making customer experience personalized and more focused on what’s relevant to them presents a game-changing opportunity for banks. The focus should no longer be on just solving complex banking problems by digitization alone but refocus on usability and user-centric design. Banks need to make a shift from having a functionality mindset to one that is customer-centric, and value-driven like some of the most loved brands.
The Emotional Connect
Given that a brand is experienced through its digital interface more than ever before, only a few are successful at delivering a delightful digital interaction. While banks understand a digital-first strategy is essential to transform the business, they miss out on creating the right kind of digital feel that builds an emotional connection with their consumers. For consumers, the digital experience is not just about simplified banking but also about engagement and delight. Consumers are looking for the same level of digital engagement similar to what their favourite brands offer.
Deploy Intelligent Processing Technologies
An AI/ML-assisted intelligent development support environment can dramatically improve the digital experience. Machine Learning algorithms help process more information and provide faster intelligent insights than their human counterparts. These insights help banks predict, automate, and augment decision-making capabilities, thereby building quality early in the project lifecycle and bringing optimal results in the customer journey.
Bank Readiness Checks
The view of digital banking and application development needs to evolve from a stand-alone and linear view to one that recognizes the interconnectedness and complexity involved in designing and implementing technology solutions. Digital banking customer experience is not just about the front-end application, but a constructed effort along the entire customer journey. Complacency, along with a lack of cross-functional business processes, can result in long-term reputational damage that may undermine customer relationships.
Data Readiness Checks
Enterprise risks arising out of data inaccuracies can often cause irreversible loss of reputation and put the bank at regulatory risk. In one of our recent conversations with a leading bank in the US, the head of Commercial Products shared his experience on how the product launch went to plan from a usability and functionality perspective, but some customers called in to complain that they were not seeing their data, but what looked like some other customer’s data! We have seen this situation play out more often than banks would like. Banks must understand data and user migration are infinitely more complex than functionality or usability and need to have periodic data readiness checks in place to stay away from botched implementations and outages.
Going Frictionless
With the whole new focus on delivering faster and better, it comes as no surprise that several banks are in the news for botched implementations and outages. Banks must be cognizant of the fact that they are exposing customers to a new system/new set of features and this kind of transition needs to be seamless. Be it moving from legacy systems to technology upgrades banks need to ensure day-to-day activities are not impacted and customers are not locked out of their accounts. Periodic assessments of enterprise risk in BAU are a must for banks, where each assessment tells where banks stand and what changes they need to make to get better at it.
Learn from our experience of handling large implementations and understand the strategies we developed to shorten implementation timelines without compromising quality. Get in touch with us today to know how we can help you deliver a winning customer experience.
