Coming off a global economic rollercoaster and adapting to the new customer experience environment has been a slow but steady journey for many organizations, regardless of the industry. The financial services are no different.
An industry with a thousand-year-old history has strongly relied on many aspects of its tradition. However, the onset of the pandemic significantly accelerated the adoption of the latest technology and innovation that spotlight the customer more than ever.
As customers considerably prioritized their needs and developed almost zero tolerance for poor service, financial services quite literally could not afford to fall behind the latest customer experience trends and lose clients.
Digital services taking center stage in the post-pandemic era pushed financial service companies to rethink their CX strategy in order to foster brand loyalty.
Without a proper assessment of their customers' needs, organizations can easily wander off the right path trying to implement many things at once.
To separate the wheat from the chaff, we spoke with Wes Humphrey, VP of Account Management of Banking, Financial Services & Insurance at Concentrix, who dives deep into what drives CX in the financial service world.
Identifying Key Concerns
Keeping pace with the new types of products is one of many concerns for financial service companies, partly due to the product or service complexity. Things like "buy now, pay later", cryptocurrency or simply different kinds of lending and buying models create pressure on companies in several aspects. Humphrey explains this in detail:
"Integrating new products and services into companies' offerings is very challenging, especially with services that require large infrastructure to support them. Similarly, financial service organizations also compete with the standalone companies specializing in those services."
Another significant concern for both traditional and newer financial companies has been following regulatory compliance. The prevalence of fraud, money laundering, and theft have had an impact on how customers choose between players in the financial sector. Pairing this with the need for cost control and staff shortages, banks and other financial organizations were due for a strategy optimized for the new CX environment.
Time to Reprioritize
Humphrey touches upon a number of things that financial service organizations should put first now operating in a new customer landscape. One of them is revenue generation marketing. He explains:
"Selling in financial services can be taboo, but the reality is that because of competition and new products and services that are coming and expected by consumers, there's absolutely a need to focus on revenue generation."
"As you're interacting with your customers, there's an opportunity to market products and services to them. This is where personalization also plays a significant role, because organizations should know what types of products to market to which customer based on the data they have."