Vinod Muthukrishnan, CEO and Founder, CloudCherry

“People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.”  — Harry Selfridge

Customer experience (CX) in the finance world is a constant struggle. While digital transformation is generally a marathon and not a sprint, in the case of CX this is not the case. Research shows that banks have not yet got a grip on the emerging Fintech revolution, and only 37 percent of customers believe that banks understand their needs and preferences adequately.

According to Accenture Banking 2020, more than 30 percent of consumers switched their bank providers in the past six to 12 months due to competitive pricing, customer service quality or value for money. The same report also states that 61 percent of banking customers expect to have access to more online interactions across their entire customer lifecycle.

Creating an “adequate” experience is not enough to remain competitive. As we head into 2019, consumer expectations will only continue to rise, and at a much faster rate. As experience is often the deciding factor when it comes to banking, many financial institutions are rushing to transform their business models, often getting it wrong.

Context is King

In today’s always-on world, companies have so much data at their fingertips, but unless that information is contextualized and used effectively, the experiences we create from it is useless. While the expression “360-degree view of the customer” is overused, you can’t overstate the benefits that come from having all of your customer information in one place. This data provides context to your customer’s needs.

Your CX data can indicate how customers feel, but connecting that data to customer actions within the product or through their purchases is the key to making better decisions. Yes, there is an investment to be made when it comes to CX but the ROI includes reduced attrition rates and increased Net Promoter Scores (NPS). Context is King. It unlocks the holy grail of customer experience and helps deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time.

Proactive Customer Service

Bringing your ticketing data into your customer experience management platform (CEM) helps your front line teams get ahead of customer problems. Being proactive means anticipating potential issues that your customers might see, and offering support before customers even know they need it.

A typical situation where proactive service is helpful might be the delivery of an account statement. By looking at the types of tickets your customer service teams tend to see, you can proactively answer the questions customers have on the statement itself, or even with a friendly email delivered beforehand.

But without combining the data from the tickets with the experiential data on your CEM, locating these opportunities to be proactive is difficult. It’s even more difficult to measure the impact introducing proactive service has on the customer experience. Integrating your ticketing data with your CX data provides additional context and, in turn, can help prove the ROI of proactive initiatives.

Creating Personalized Experiences

Making a customer excited to use your product is relatively easy to achieve, with all of the marketing tools that exist today. But setting ambitious expectations will often be disastrous if you can’t meet them. Since it’s easier than ever to access competitors online, customers can quickly find another promising solution to their needs and leave your company in the dust.

This is the importance of delivering an end to end customer experience: a fine line between what a customer expects from your company and the actual experience they received throughout the customer journey, with all its ups and downs. Understanding how to influence your customers’ expectations as well as delivering on the overall experience with your product can help retain customers and turn them from one time customers into loyal ambassadors.

Collecting and analyzing the right data, including contextual insights, will enable financial companies to deliver relevant experiences to customers at the individual level across channels, and in real time. Leveraging sophisticated technologies such as advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence financial services companies will be able to meet customers where they are, offering personalized digital content experiences that are not only relevant but welcomed.

By leveraging the context found in data, finance and banking brands can provide customers with the ultimate experience that is more relevant and consistent across all its channels. Implementing a strong customer experience model is possibly the best strategy for banking institutions and could be the sole differentiator if implemented correctly.

About the author: 

Vinod Muthukrishnan, Founder and CEO, CloudCherry
First a Sailor, then a strategist and now an entrepreneur. Vinod has worked in diverse and challenging environments starting from the Merchant Navy, a high energy Mobile first Financial Technology startup where he headed strategy and Global Sales and now currently serving as Co-Founder and CEO of CloudCherry – a technology startup based in Pleasanton, CA with offices in Singapore and India.