If 2020 and 2021 taught us something key is that banks need to keep working to meet the ever-increasing expectations of their customers. Let's analyze the top 5 banking customer experience trends for 2022.
When the benefits of innovation are too high to be ignored, even a sector as deep-seated as banking tries to immediately align with trends.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, customers have gotten used to digital banking and have developed ever-increasing expectations on what's their bank has to provide them (how and when). In fact, three-quarters of financial organizations said that around half of their customers have switched from in-person to digital financial services during the last 2 years.
If banks want to remain competitive and have a long lasting relationship with their costumers, banks have to widen their digital portfolio and improve their customers CX and UX.
What are the latest trends in banking?
Let's analyze the most popular ones to understand what digital customers expect from banks.
1. Online advisory services
During the pandemic,when people were spending most of their time at home and personal interactions were reduced to the minimum, a wide range of customers discovered the opportunity to have advisory sessions online with their financial consultants. If banks and customers first conceived this service as a temporary solution, it is now perceived as the new normal. This is a type of service that people not only don't want to give up on but even want to expand to other products of the portfolio.
Banks now need to step up their game and develop targeted services for their increasingly digital customer base and provide them with a wide range of opportunities online: mortgage or credit card request but also financial advisory for investments. Those who turn to the internet for support often only find information that is too broad to be of any real use. Advisory online allow banks to improve their digital services by providing their customers with in-house financial advisors who can guide them with a personalized session tailored to their needs.
Another very important aspect to take into consideration is the possibility to work on up-selling and cross-selling opportunities during these sessions of advisory online.
A successful example is represented by the project that Vivocha developed with Intesa Sanpaolo International Subsidiary Banks dedicated to digital onboarding. It includes the possibility to apply for a mortgage online and only reduce to one appointment the need to go to a physical branch. (click here to find out more).
2. Automation
Another key trend to improve customer experience in banking next year is the ability to integrate automation in various processes: onboarding, balance inquiry or other frequent reasons of contact via chat that not only allow to optimize interactions but also increase employee efficiency.
An accurate integration of automation allows to reduce the amount of time, effort and resources that are actually needed to complete tasks while driving customer satisfaction. First of all, it is essential to proceed with the analysis of your customer journey map and then with the integration of a virtual agent (artificial intelligence) as a support to your staff. This way, they only focus on high value activities that require personalization, empathy and a profound expertise in video sessions or communications via chat and messaging apps.
Extremely useful could be the integration of a chatbot based on an a type of artificial intelligence capable of analyzing interactions and identify the most common questions, answers and area of interest for your customers. That will allow to transform your chat in a source that generates more knowledge (available to your staff and customers) but also to make sure that your bot never stops learning and becomes more independent on a wider range of topics. A successful example of this trend is represented by the project developed by Vivocha and Digitiamo for Quixa (a fully digital insurance in Italy) that was awarded at the Italian Insurtech Summit.
Onboarding is another key process where automation comes in handy. A satisfying customer experience is usually based on a good first impression, and for most banking customers, that takes place during onboarding.
Traditionally, this process involves reviewing and signing huge amounts of documents, which increases the risk of delays and process bottlenecks, testing customers’ patience. By transforming onboarding into an electronic process rather than a manual one, banks make it easy for their customers to provide essential onboarding information whenever and wherever they prefer. From there, banks can use automation to expedite key parts of the process, so customers can open their accounts much faster, without necessarily go to the local branch, further optimizing the overall customer experience.
3. Customer centricity - the experience gap
Today almost everything is accessible online, but it's not enough for technology to simply add another option to the sea of possibilities. Customer experience is what truly makes a bank stand out from other digital financial services. Even though this seems so simple and obvious, customer experience improvements often end up failing. This can be summed up with the expression “experience gap,” which often consists of a number of factors that go unnoticed.
A successful and long-lasting relationship with your customers begins by looking at how your brand is delivering services from your customers’ perspectives. Integrate analytics to understand customer journeys, identify customer pain points but most of all include your customers feedbacks in your evaluation process. These insights will help define where to focus your efforts in order to have the best return.
During the event dedicated to the digitization of the banking system, organized by Covisian Group , a new study conducted by AppQuality, company focused on optimizing processes through the power of crowd-testing and customer feedbacks, showed how banks are becoming more and more digital and how involving your customers inputs can help delivering excellent services with a high level of satisfaction.
With the ongoing shift toward customer-centricity, it's crucial to re-design both the company's business approach and the way its performance is measured. For many years, the key indicators used to measure performance were only related to the level of sales, conversion and the number of leads. But today to become a successful financial brand, the main focus has to switch toward:
- customer feedbacks
- the number of users who recommend the bank to friends
- the reasons for complaints about any service
- the percentage of positive and negative comments about the bank on social media
4. Self-service
Executives believe that a coherent and optimized customer experience across channels is a key factor that more and more banks are taking into consideration . However, one service capability continues to challenge them.
While there are multiple obstacles to a seamless customer experience, the biggest challenge is actually the ability to provide enough self-service options for customers. Sometimes they don't want to spend time waiting on the phone or trying to explain an issue to a bot via chat...what they actually want is a FAQ section (continuously expanded based on new services or issues clients are interested in) or a guided procedure on the website/app of the bank so that they can handle things on their own.
Artificial intelligence can be extremely helpful when it comes to improving self-service. It can help you aggregate information from various channels and touchpoints and provide insights and useful information on the most frequently asked questions, and related answers, so that the company can continuously update the knowledge base in the FAQ section and improve services so that they are more user-friendly.
5. Proactive Engagement
What does it mean and what does it imply?
Proactive engagement is an approach to customer support, where companies actively make the first move to understand their customers and sort their issues.
When it comes to banks and their relationship with their clients, advanced analytics and ad hoc platforms, such as Vivocha's, can help guarantee a service that once seemed unimaginable.
Now, banks can monitor customers’ financial health and proactively offer assistance with financial management or suggest opportunities to grow their wealth. This type of proactive engagement can take place across any number of channels — in-person, over the phone, through their app, but also on messaging apps such as Apple Messages.
We can expect to see more financial institutions go out of their way to improve customer experience and customer satisfaction in order to demonstrate that they listen to them and want to provide the best experience and communication that they can.
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