Customer Flow: Revolutionizing the Customer Experience in Banking
Managing your customer experience from the very beginning of the journey till the very end, be that onboarding, resolution of an issue, regulating customer flow, or any type of concern, presents itself as a recurring cycle of hustle. If correctly and virtuously set up early on, banks will have significant and measurable revenue growth and financial performance changes. Recent research from Oxford Economics highlights the inclination of financial institutions to put additional efforts towards improving customer experience, outranking by priority even mitigating the risks and increasing revenue.
What better year to bring abrupt changes to how banks interact with clients than the year of the global pandemic. Is going fully digital the new norm? Is the trend of digitalization going towards saying goodbye to brick-and-mortar branches and removing the concept of physical customer flow, or maybe there is a pitfall that is sliding off of our immediate sight?
When talking about the accelerated shift towards doing everything online, from meeting your therapist to earning and spending money on services and goods to be delivered, it becomes evident that time allocated to each operation is limited. We want to manage it all as quickly as possible. The time window that a banking app gets from the tech-savvy client is short, so the experience needs to be intense, to the point, and needs to cover as many operations as possible.
It’s time to review a few hot trends that banks can’t help but keep under the radar.
Balancing customers’ online and in-branch experiences
Let’s not go crazy about the digital epiphany. Despite many operations going online, branch visits are still a thing. A new skill we all acquired intentionally or not, maybe by inertia, is avoiding the queues. Scheduling your visit to the bank in advance is becoming the new normal, and banks are not delaying integrating online appointment scheduling solutions. One of the ways for the bank to avoid physical customer flows is to connect the banking app to the scheduling software through API, or otherwise be present in scheduling apps and direct your clients to use it. From the clients’ side, this experience is time-saving at the least: imagine arriving at the branch exactly when it’s your turn to be served. For the bank’s side, this reorganized customer flow opens new perspectives for the management to reveal resource allocation problems that would have otherwise been out of focus.
Personalized client journey
Today, when businesses’ success is firmly anchored in customer centricity, discussions around what our prospects really want are inexhaustible. If clients want to benefit from modern technology and the multitude of operations that can be done online, they have to come into terms with the fact of their personal data being processed one way or another, be that behaviour and buying patterns or personal information to some extent. So that the transparency people subscribe to does not feel like groundless confidentiality loss, product offers, upsell or cross sell should be extra personalized and leave the client feeling like the offer was tailored specifically for them.
As a concept of people centricity in today’s world suggested by Gartner’s predictions for 2021 tech trends is Internet of Behaviors, which is essentially about the following: “IoB captures the “digital dust” of people’s lives from a variety of sources, and that information can be used by public or private entities to influence behavior”. A valid example they bring in the ebook is about having drivers’ breaking, cornering and speed tracked in exchange for lower insurance premiums. This captures the essence of IoB being mutual benefit, otherwise it risks being rejected by consumers.
