How can Financial Services businesses improve Customer Experience?
The financial services industry in America has been one of the largest and most stable for the past 5 years, continuing to show year on year growth.
Like many other industries, finance has been deeply affected by COVID-19, which has changed the way businesses operate throughout 2020 and 2021. Alongside the global pandemic, technological advancements have resulted in more ways for consumers to interact with businesses in this space. Gone are the days of having to wait on hold for hours and hours; consumers can interact with their banking or insurance providers via email, live chat, chatbots and banking/insurance apps, just to name a few.
For these reasons, 2021 brings increased importance to understanding, prioritizing and improving customer experience to businesses in the financial services space. In this article we explore the areas where they can improve their customer experience, increasing the likelihood of longer-lasting relationships with their customers.
Customer Listening for Financial Services
Customer listening is essential to improving the customer experience of any business and this is especially true in the financial services industry.
Where communication and interactions between customers and businesses take place over a platform such as an app, gathering feedback from customers through surveys is crucial to finding issues in the experience. Even a small problem, such as a link or button that does not go anywhere on a banking app, can be experienced by hundreds of thousands of users.
Beyond finding problems, customer listening is valuable in discovering which offers or new features will resonate with existing customers and likely attract new customers.
Customer listening typically takes the form of surveys, customer interviews, user testing, or focus groups. Combined with heat mapping technologies that aggregate both quantitative and qualitative data on how customers engage with websites or mobile applications, businesses can get a clear picture of what to improve and what to fix.
Financial Services Customer Service
With so many options available to ask for help or inquire about new and existing products, having to wait on hold on the phone is not necessary. For any business, having alternatives to the dreaded wait times on hold is essential.
Ensuring that users not only have options to get assistance from a business support team but also locate the solution they are looking for is important. Having FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) pages on your website will help users to find the answers they seek independently.
Incorporating technology such as chatbots and live chat will not only address unwanted, unnecessary wait times, but also provide data on what your customers are asking for and how they are asking for help; you will also get valuable data around how your customer service teams (if using live chat) are helping your customers, ensuring you and your management can improve customer service.
Personalization
With more customer listening comes the ability to personalize your offering based on what customers seek. Making recommendations for relevant products or services can increase the revenue generated from existing customers. Ensuring this is not invasive or disruptive to the customer’s experience is critical. Beyond recommending relevant products and services, reward programs and customer incentivization can be personalized based on historic activity and generate great engagement from existing customers.
There are many means to improve customer experience in 2021 for the financial services industry. Turning to personalization, customer listening, or improving customer service are now more viable than ever with the sheer amount of technology and customer data accessible for a better, improved service offering by businesses.
