Customer-centric solutions are more important than ever in the financial services industry as the demand for digital services continues to increase. A proven strategy for achieving this is by effectively utilizing automation in combination with a human touch to generate more meaningful interactions that produce a more positive customer and member experience.For financial institutions, customer-centricity is most successful when built around seven key principles that link to business performance:

1.  Needs - If organizations do not understand their customer’s/member’s needs, there is little chance they can satisfy them. Consumer needs are constantly changing, which is why it is important to identify and track them.
2. Engagement – This refers to deploying timely and relevant content through effective communication to proactively connect with a customer/member. Consumers want education and guidance, access to knowledgeable people, efficient fulfillment processes and quality service.
3. Customer Experience and Treatment – Consumers have a long list of expectations regarding how they want to be treated, and they expect high levels of customer/member experience. Through proactive engagement, driving digital customer satisfiers up and eliminating customer dissatisfiers, the optimal customer/member experience can be achieved.
4. Issues Detection and Resolution – Once an issue is detected, organizations need to be able to responsively work to resolve it. This can be achieved by automation that tracks and measures the impact of issues, and with the use of predictive analytics, reports the customer retention risk for mitigation.
5. Reliability and Consistency - Recent studies provide a list of 18 explicit satisfiers and dissatisfiers. Amplifying the satisfiers and eliminating the dissatisfiers helps ensure a reliable and consistent experience for consumers.
6. Feedback – Digital delivery has a high consumer acceptance rate for many reasons, but mainly due to it increasing customer/member control. Providing consumer feedback results in three beneficial outcomes: increasing customer empowerment, providing valuable self-reported information and showing that organizations care about their customers/members.
7. Value-Driven Decisions and Actions – Financial institutions always strive for a high customer satisfaction rate. However, improving customer experience in some customer market segments does not always translate to monetary return. 

As digital banking continues to grow, the concept of the customer experience is evolving as well, and ARGO is at the forefront of this evolution with ARGO Connects. Regardless of channel (branch, online, mobile), the strategic importance of delivering high quality customer and member experiences is profound – especially in today’s market environment. Doing so effectively drives increased loyalty, insulates financial institutions from competitive threats and positions banks and credit unions to increase profitability over time.

To learn more about ARGO Connects and how it can positively impact your institution, view our interview brief.