How to Transform Your Banking Customer Journey

 
Digital banking is now the norm, with 90% of consumers and 86% of businesses using digital banking channels. Additionally, having 24/7 accessibility to financial information and services means that customers demand exceptional experiences in real time, everywhere. When digital services and customer service don’t measure up, customers may switch banks.

To enhance CX and retain bank customers, financial service organizations must undergo a digital transformation to deliver better banking customer journeys.

What Is a Banking Customer Journey?

A banking customer journey is a series of digital and non-digital interactions customers have with your bank to make a decision (e.g., open a new account?) or accomplish a specific task (e.g., apply for a credit card). Customers decide what actions to take at each step in the process, but the bank has an opportunity to influence those decisions and behaviors, improving the customer experience and increasing loyalty and lifetime value.

According to McKinsey, a typical regional bank has more than 1,500 customer journeys (across business units, product lines and customer interactions).

Here are some of the banking customer journeys that are particularly important, from onboarding and using bank products and services to resolving problems:

• Research account types, loans or credit cards
• Open a bank account
• Apply for a loan, mortgage or credit card
• Receive and activate card(s) (onboarding)
• Activate online banking
• Receive alerts about suspicious behavior on a credit card or other account
• Receive and pay bills
• Pay late fees
• Report a missing or stolen card
• Complain about transaction or fees

Why the Banking Customer Journey Matters

Customers rely on your bank to provide up-to-the-moment information to help them make wise financial decisions. They want real-time, easy and intuitive communications regarding important items like their mortgage loan application, alerts about fraudulent charges on their credit card account, reminders so they don’t miss a payment and even notifications about other financial service products they should be using.

Some banks are not meeting those expectations.

According to a global survey of 6,000 consumers, 25% of customers switched banks, and 39% of those who switched did so due to poor customer service. More than half (53%) would switch financial providers to get a better digital experience. An S&P global survey found that almost 40% of customers who switched banks between May 2021 and April 2022 switched to get a better mobile banking app experience (38.7%) or better customer service (37.9%).

To satisfy and retain customers, banks need to deliver better digital experiences and customer journeys.

Benefits of Improving Banking Customer Journeys

Making it easy and convenient to do business with your bank pays off in many ways.

Better customer satisfaction and CX: McKinsey research reveals that shopping, onboarding and problem resolution journeys “disproportionally drive the overall experience that a customer has with their bank.” According to Forrester research, organizations with better customer experiences tend to enjoy increased revenues, lower costs, reduced risk of customer attrition and the ability to charge premium prices for their products and services.

Greater loyalty: Satisfied customers are six times more likely (than dissatisfied customers) to say they’ll remain with a bank.

Higher revenue: Improving CX directly impacts the bottom line. For a large multichannel bank, a one-point improvement in its CX Index score can lead to an incremental $123 million in revenue. Customer satisfaction is positively correlated with purchasing decisions. Satisfied banking customers say they will purchase more of that bank’s products.

Better financial metrics: According to McKinsey research, banks excelling in customer satisfaction lead in several financial metrics:

• Increased growth
• Total shareholder return (TSR)
• Decreased costs

Focus on Three Forgotten Banking Customer Journeys

Many brands focus primarily on acquiring new customers—but not on keeping them happy. CX teams need to pay more attention to several “forgotten” banking customer journeys to reduce pain points, enhance CX and boost customer retention:

Receive proactive alerts about suspicious activity. When you’re at CostCo trying to pay for your new 75” Smart TV, you don’t want to discover that your credit card has been suspended due to suspicious activity. To eliminate this customer pain point, a customer journey management system delivers proactive fraud notifications:

• Detects suspicious behavior on a credit card account.
• Notifies customers that their card has been suspended due to suspicious activity.
• Allows customers to immediately verify the authenticity of the charges.
• Reactivates the card, allowing the customer to complete their purchase.

Receive notification of exceeding overdraft limit. Discovering on the last day of the month that you don’t have enough money in your account to cover your rent is extremely stressful. To eliminate this pain point, proactively notify customers when they are about to exceed their overdraft limit and indicate the charges they may incur if they exceed the limit. This gives them time to transfer money, avoiding the overdraft fees and the ding on their credit record for a late rent payment.

Pay late fees. Customers who miss several loan payments incur late fees, damage their credit score and face the embarrassment and hassle of dealing with a collection agency. To prevent these negative consequences (and eliminate the expense of using a collection agency), remind customers who have overdue payments to pay their late fees. Alert the customer that their account will be suspended and they will be handled by an external collection agency if payment is not made by a certain date.

Seven Tips to Improve CX

You must understand what your customers need and what pain points they’re experiencing to improve customer experience. Keep your customers front and center when developing your digital or CX transformation strategy and new processes. If you make assumptions about what needs fixing, you may waste a lot of time and money on a solution that doesn’t solve the real problem.

Some CX leaders don’t pay attention to the customer voice when they’re planning a CX transformation. For example, one payments provider was considering completely modifying its technology to reduce the processing time for resolving customer disputes. After collecting customer feedback, the company discovered that the major pain point was the lack of status updates—not processing time. By understanding what bothered customers, the company solved the problem more easily and effectively, with a higher likelihood of improving CX. Sending regular status updates by email or text is simpler and less expensive than overhauling technology.

Here are seven strategies to enhance CX:
 

1. Improve the digital experience.

Customers depend on your bank to deliver the information and communications they need, when they need them, wherever they are. To do that, you need efficient digital solutions such as:

• User-friendly website with self-service capabilities
• Mobile app
• Interactive teller machines that offer expanded services such as real-time video conferencing and chat support
• Interactive voice response (IVR) system that helps customers resolve their issues without speaking with an agent

2. Help customers migrate to digital channels.

According to McKinsey research, customers who regularly use a bank’s mobile app or website (or both) have the highest average satisfaction compared to customers who use other interaction channels or infrequently use the digital channels. But offering fabulous digital tools doesn’t mean that customers will automatically use them. To encourage digital adoption:

• Streamline enrollment. Make it simple to set up an online account and mobile app.
• Educate customers about new digital offerings. “How-to” videos on the website—and printed instructions in paper statements—increase awareness and provide support for customers who are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with mobile apps and remote services.
• Redirect customers to digital channels. Use in-branch and call center or IVR intercepts to direct customers to digital solutions (e.g., ITM or website). Encourage customers to go digital through messages/reminders in statements and emails.
• Motivate customers and employees. Consider charging a fee for using non-digital channels or offering a discount for going paperless. Reward employees who redirect customers to digital channels.

3. Adopt an omnichannel approach.

Customers want to be able to get information and connect with your bank through their preferred channels, such as web, email, voice, live chat, SMS and/or mobile app. They may gather information about loan products and rates via your website, discuss their options with a banker via phone and then complete the transaction by phone, email or in-person. Then they may use a mobile app to check their loan application status or account balance and chat with support agents, if necessary. Bank customers expect consistent, secure experiences when accessing their financial information and seeking support, whatever channel they’re using—even if they are using more than one channel at a time. To provide this seamless omnichannel banking experience in your retail banking strategy, communication channels must work together. Maintaining the context of all customer interactions requires having real-time omnichannel customer data that is ingested across disparate systems and departments (e.g., billing, marketing, contact center).
 

4. Glean insights into your customers at the individual level.

Customers expect their banks to understand their specific needs and preferences and offer tailored products and services to meet those needs. According to Forrester’s 2022 U.S. Banking Customer Experience Index, the second-most important CX factor is “Offers the banking products/services that I need.” The number one CX factor is “Resolves problems/issues quickly.” According to a Bain & Company report, there’s a 123-point difference in Net Promoter Score between respondents who strongly agree that their bank interacts with them based on knowing who they are and those who strongly disagree. According to Deloitte, “customers want interactions with their bank to be as sophisticated, immediate, and personalized as their experiences with other industries. As a result, financial services customers are willing to share data as long as they receive offerings tailored to their needs. Yet, 94% of banks cannot deliver on this hyper-personalization potential.” You can hyper-personalize customer experiences by analyzing real-time customer data, allowing you to deliver tailored messages about products, services and prices that are context-specific, timely and relevant to customers’ individual needs. For example, you could identify recent high school graduates and offer them checking accounts or credit cards geared toward college students.
 

5. Provide human touch as well as digital interactions.

While most bank customers use digital channels to do at least some of their banking, consumers expect assistance from a live representative—especially when they’re dealing with complicated issues. According to Citizens’ Banking Experience Survey, human interaction, delivered in person or virtually, is the preferred way to get financial advice and execute more complex transactions.  Accenture’s Financial Services Global Consumer Study found that most consumers only use their bank’s digital channels for quick functional tasks. Nearly 63% of survey respondents said most of their mobile banking logins are simply to check their account balance. Almost half (44%) of consumers aged 18-44 had trouble getting human support when they needed it.According to Forrester’s UK Banking CX Index Rankings 2023, digital-only experiences are ranked highest for ease and experience, while hybrid experiences (digital plus human interaction) win on emotion. Emotion strongly impacts customer loyalty, so it’s important to consider how to include hybrid experiences in customer journeys.

Use technology to enhance human interactions:

• Provide automated self-service. Self-service solutions should quickly solve basic customer problems, reducing call volume and freeing up live agents to assist customers with more complicated issues. Natural language processing analyzes customer responses to interactive voice response (IVR) prompts, identifying intent and needs. The decisioning system determines the most appropriate response or action based on customer information (intent, account information and behavioral patterns) and business rules or logic.
• Use technology to assist call center agents, not replace them. Intent-based call routing directs callers to the correct agent, reducing call transfers and customer frustration. Proactive agent guidance (e.g., real-time call transcripts, additional customer information) helps agents quickly assist customers.

6. Use customer journey analytics to understand each customer’s journey.

Customer journey analytics tracks and measures every interaction with your brand, across every channel and device the customer uses. Journey analytics helps you understand customer needs, desires and expectations, allowing you to deliver personalized experiences that meet those needs. Journey analytics combines individual channel analytics (e.g., website, email, call center) with customer intent indicators (e.g., intent to purchase or cancel, observed product preferences, switched channels) to provide insight into why customers are doing what they’re doing. Customer journey orchestration platforms then use this information to send the right messages at the right time to guide customers toward the next best action.
 

7. Use customer journey management (CJM) to deliver right-time and real-time journeys at the individual level.

CJM detects real-time signals (based on customer behavior) and determines the best next action to take—and when to take it. Journey orchestration analyzes interactions and customer behaviors from other technologies (e.g., customer relationship management, billing) to determine the next best action in the contact center. For example, when a customer calls to report fraudulent credit card charges, the system uses intent-based call routing to direct the customer to the fraud department and provides relevant information (e.g., the transcript from a chatbot session or previous calls) to the agent. The agent has access to the unified customer profile, enabling faster problem resolution.

Improve Your Banking Customer Experience With CSG Xponent Ignite

CSG Xponent, our industry-leading customer journey management solution, combines digital communication, customer journey analytics and decisioning to analyze customer behavior and deliver the right messages at the right time to guide customers to the next best action to achieve their desired outcome.