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Customer experience best practice for financial services

Posted by Perceptive Insights Team - 27 February, 2023

In this blog, we're focusing on best practice customer experience and how the most successful financial services businesses get it right. At the end of this post we’ll give you some pointers on how to overcome your customer experience challenges.

What are the cornerstones of customer experience best practice in financial services?

Getting buy in from the top

The way to make customer-centricity thrive in a financial services organisation is to get the head honchos to buy in to your customer centric strategy. Need ideas on how to justify your new approach? Check out  this post on how your business can grow by putting your customers first.

A first step is to include the thought of the customer in every single thing you do, e.g. whenever anyone makes a business proposal, they should include current and relevant data from your customer feedback. While the big decisions are being made at HQ you should always ask: “What do our customers think about that?”

Filter everything you do through a “customer filter”—both on daily tasks and long-term projects—and communicate to teams and leadership that what your business does has a real impact on customers. In these discussions, always clarify how customers are impacted, using examples and real-life stories as much as possible.

 

Related content: The common pitfalls of customer experience management

 

Focusing on people

Managing your customer experience is not just about solving problems; it’s about building a lasting relationship with your customers. Why? For the simple fact that you want them as lifetime customers, not just one-off transactions.

However, it’s not just about your customers but equally about your employees. If your employees feel valued and buy in to your brand essence and vision, that’ll shine through in their dealings with customers every day. It’s about keeping those relationships alive and well through multiple touch points, rewarding good behaviour and asking for feedback continually.

Remember Maya Angelou’s famous saying: "People won’t remember what you do or what you say, but they will remember how you made them feel."

The truth is that people actually love to buy—they just hate to be sold to. A good way to position this is: You’re not in the business of selling products or services, you’re in the business of helping people buy products or services.

 

Keep the customer experience consistent across all touchpoints

This is made easy by automation. Automating manual processes can help alleviate the pressures on consistency across the business and improve the customer experience as a whole. This goes for any manual work that has an online counterpart today; customer call centre systems, CRM solutions, and customer experience management solutions including customer satisfaction surveys. This will help save time and importantly also resource expenditure.

Great, you may think. But what if I’m struggling with my customer experience management and feel like I’m getting nowhere fast? Check out our free eBook Five CX for financial services solved. It focuses on the financial services industry, however, even if you're not a financial services business, the tips will still be useful.

 


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3 customer experience best practice tips for financial services

With the financial services industry being as competitive as it is, differentiation through excellent customer experience has become crucial. Are you doing these things to win at customer experience? 

A lot of these strategies will be applicable across a range of other industries, so even if you’re not a financial services business, it might pay off to read on. Let’s look at how some of the best businesses do it. And then, we’ll give you some pointers on how to overcome your customer experience challenges. 

 

1. Be exceptional

Don’t be mediocre. Ask yourself: what makes a businesses customer experience truly stand out? And we mean stand out as in exceptional.

Aiming to please is one thing, but going over and VERY beyond in your service is what keeps you up the top. Understanding customers is important, but adding value and educating them, is just so. Is there another savings plan or investment option that they might not have thought about? What would make life easier for them and their family? Being proactive in your approach and anticipating your customers needs is what wins you the game.

 

Related content: The common pitfalls of customer experience management

 

2. Be customer-centric

Okay, so that term may be over-used but for good reason. It still is very relevant and effective. Putting the customer at the centre of every business interaction (whether internal or external; with staff, in-store or in digital applications) will yield you every reward when it comes to pleasing your customers.

And we all know what happens when a business has a lot of happy customers. Positive word-of-mouth, referrals and more qualified sales leads for your business. Result!

Being customer-centric is in its ideal scenario a whole business strategy; however in the real world (and especially with slow moving financial services businesses) it may have to be implemented one department at a time, depending on how your leadership team operates.

 

3. Make customer feedback the hero

If customer feedback was a super hero, we reckon he/she be called Insightatron, or something of the sort! Basically, customer feedback is the holy grail from where your organisation can learn and grow. Something to “marvel” at (couldn’t help it).

Inertia is your kryptonite. Not acting on feedback is the worst thing your organisation can do. Have a lot of unhappy customers? Here's why this is not such a bad place to be after all.

So that’s all great, you may think. “But what if I’m struggling with my customer experience management and feel like I’m getting nowhere fast?” Check out our free eBook "Key customer experience issues for financial services - solved!" by clicking on the image below. It focuses on the financial services industry, however even if you're not a financial services business, the tips will still be useful.

 


3 ways financial services can win at best practice customer experience

As a part of our focus on financial services businesses, we’ll take a look at how customer experience excellence looks for this industry. A lot of these strategies are applicable across a range of other industries, so even if you’re not a financial services business, it will pay off to read on. 

 

1. Base customer experience solutions on individual customer needs 

Today's customers are armed with data, information and access. The businesses that excel will be companies that understand what individual customers really want—and give it to them.

But with so many different customer groups out there, how can you possibly begin to develop a strategy to keep your customers happy?

The best way to determine what your customers actually want is to ask them. It really is that easy. This can be done through surveys at end of customer service calls, exit surveys and online customer satisfaction surveys, or a combination of all three.

Once you are armed with this data, it needs to be turned into actionable information. A good starting point is creating a customer experience map, which will highlight the individual touchpoints each of your major customer demographics will go through.

The map will highlight pain points and highlights as well, giving you the granular data you need to target discreet, individual issues for each of your customers—and resolve them.

 
Related content: The secret to ROI for customer experience management
 

 

2. Focus on digital customer experience—mobile in particular

Customers can now access your products whenever and however they want.

Creating a powerful digital customer experience is no longer optional. Your business needs to adopt a multi-channel approach, as customers are more empowered and using multiple devices—especially to research products and services before they buy.

In fact, one study from Retailing Today discovered that 81 per cent of all shoppers research a product or service online before they invest in it—and that study was from four years ago. Considering the rapid growth in internet users since then, you can surely imagine how many shoppers there are researching online as we speak.

To capture those users, you need to offer digital—and a basic website is no longer enough.

For example, the user experience needs to be optimised for various screen sizes and operating systems—we're talking about mobile devices here since smartphones dominate more than half of all total internet usage.

People are more connected than ever, and they're mostly getting the experience through mobile. You need to be able to adapt to that.

 

3. How to prove customer experience ROI

How can the customer experience be made cost-effective for financial services? Putting this in perspective, what’s more cost-effective from a wider business point of view:

Scenario 1

Securing 100 retained customers through a monthly investment into an advanced customer experience management solution that:

  • highlights your customer experience issues,
  • lets you know what’s not working and what is; and,
  • enables you to save your customers before they end up leaving you.

 

Scenario 2

Keep fighting fires, not knowing what your business may be doing wrong, and spend your budget on trying to acquire new customers (with advertising, sales and other acquisition costs).

We think the answer is quite clear.

So that’s all great, you may think. “But what if I’m struggling with my customer experience management and feel like I’m getting no where fast?” The solution could be in our free eBook: Five CX issues for financial services solved.

 


One_step

How to simplify customer experience management in financial services

Revenue pressures and increased regulations have caused the financial services industry to re-evaluate expenses across the board. This has resulted in consolidating resources, streamlining of initiatives and having to make savings wherever possible. Delivering a consistent customer experience across all touch points, whilst on a tight budget, is often the challenge. 

 

Solution: Automate manual processes and utilise online systems

Automating manual processes can help alleviate the pressures on consistency across the business and improve the customer experience as a whole. This goes for any manual work that has an online counterpart today; customer call center systems, CRM solutions, and customer experience management solutions including customer satisfaction surveys. This will help save time but crucially also resource expenditure.

Working in multiple spreadsheets managed by various people can often make life confusing—and quite frankly—frustrating! Version control ("which version of the “final” document are we on again?") is often something that causes financial companies a lot of pain. Employing an online, central solution enables you to get on with running your business while the system is working hard for you. Phew, no more spreadsheet version control disasters! (We’ve been there too). 

 

Access daily customer data

When it comes to customer experience management and online customer feedback, having the ability to access valuable, daily customer data all in one place is gold. With an automated system that deploys surveys automatically, you can understand your levels of loyalty and word of mouth in the market on a regular basis. As mentioned, this also enables you to maintain your business as usual as there won’t be any need for additional resource. 

Managing your customer experience on a continuous basis can be both costly and time-consuming if you choose to do it on your own. Thinking that it will save you money to do it in-house can often backfire when you realise that there’s a lot more work involved than you initially envisaged. Also, not having the right research expertise may lead you to not get the answers you need.

Thus, the solution is to automate and use centralised systems wherever possible. There are plenty of cloud-based online platforms on the market today, and investing your money wisely can lead not only to long-term savings but also valuable gains in data and insights derived. 

 


The best way to analyse your customer experience feedback

The best way to analyse your customer experience feedback

Analysing data is a challenge for many businesses. Even if they have someone to decipher the data, often what they receive comes in the form of a static report or a spreadsheet. This can result in difficulties when trying to understand patterns over a period of time and customising the data to meet their objectives. And the final sticking point: it's a lot of work to manage.

 

Solution: a dynamic, online customer experience platform

Having access to an advanced, dynamic platform to analyse data is crucial as it not only sorts through your complex data, but presents it in a visual and easy-to-understand format. This “pre-analysis” makes it far simpler to interpret results, from a high level down to the granular when you look to analyse and compare certain periods of time, or view daily results or example. Lastly, this automatic analyses of your data also allows you to track tangible changes in your business and uncover themes in specific areas by using intelligent filters and word clouds.

 

Segment your data based on sentiment

If you're using the Net Promoter Score (NPS), you can segment your customers into Promoters (those who love your product/services and would recommend you to others); Passives (those who are on the fence) and Detractors (those who are unhappy with your services and wouldn't recommend you to anyone). From there, you can compare the sentiments of each segment and identify the key elements that are winning—and losing—you customers.

Likewise, if you’re measuring employee engagement you can easily set and measure staff KPIs with the same system. You’ll also be able to pinpoint areas for you to improve on (based on text analytics) and benchmark your performance against other businesses in your industry.


 

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Topics: Customer Experience


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