Delivering the Ultimate Customer Experience: Challenges, Strategies & Solutions

Whatever the industry, the key to success in today’s business landscape lies in keeping customer experience at the core of decisions. Financial institutions operate in a traditionally product-centric sector but are now shifting to a customer-centric approach, where digital transformation plays an essential role in this change.

Providing an enhanced digital customer experience is not only a differentiator in an environment with the increasing competition but has become crucial most recently due to COVID-19.

Real value exists in the delivery of products and services through a seamless CX, reducing cost and building customer loyalty. A satisfied client is five to eight times more likely to recommend services.

Customer experience in banking is composed of several key moments that go far beyond the onboarding stage. Creating value in the customer relationship must start with acknowledging the complexity of these relationships, followed by a prioritisation of the elements of the experience that are the most essential to managing the cross-functional nature of customer needs.

Current landscape perspective in CX

Faced with new competitors that ranks high in customer satisfaction, experience and convenience, banks now face the challenge of losing prospective customers due to the complexity of onboarding.

Delivering the ultimate customer experience requires a consistent focus on value and ensuring that the customer has a central role across departments and processes. Even though businesses know the benefits of enhanced customer experience, they don’t usually make same the  effort to improve as with traditional productivity transformations. The challenge, therefore, resides in maintaining focus on customer experience throughout the entire customer relationship.

Solutions to perform better

In order to overcome the challenges that arise, companies must be able to address their customers’ expectations and surpass them. This translates into an experience that is seamless, easy to understand and to navigate. In the case of digital banking, applications must be as simple and optimised as possible, and should provide an enjoyable experience. For this, teams, processes and technologies must focus on what the customer will experience, rather than on the product.

The implementation as an organisational change

When implementing a customer experience transformation, the action plan must include the regulations, governance, processes and security without losing sight of the focus: the customer.

All stakeholders in an organisation must be involved. All parties must pull in the right direction and share a common focus, i.e. you guessed it, the customers’ experience. Customer feedback must flow throughout the organisation, to implement applications and engagement improvements.

Yielding the results of great CX

A shift towards customer-centricity not only attracts new customers, but increases customer retention and, ultimately, an increased share of wallet.

To ensure success, the experience must be consistent across all platforms and engagements,  Where information and format must be aligned. It is important to maintain records of all engagement with a customer, as this history ensures that both the relationship manager and the customer have access to accurate information, as and when it is required.

Working on improving customer experience ensures customer retention and allows for further referrals. Regardless of whether the engagement is made digitally or in person, the systems, applications and data must all drive and compliment the experience for the customer.

CX should not only be built into a business’ applications, but it should also be a core aspect on a cultural level, the customer is the business. Setting high standards in terms of customer experience, however, generates growing expectations. This calls for a continuous reviewing of the processes of management, service and engagement with the customer to ensure customer satisfaction is maintained.

VASS experience on CX

As a consulting partner, engaging with the right stakeholders is extremely important to us, for it drives the success of the project, translating into a customer experience strategy that delivers results.

At VASS, we make sure that business and IT are aware of the strategic importance of customer-centricity, translating business strategy into applications which employee and customers not only adopt, but ultimately embrace.