Three-Part Strategy for CX Success in Financial Services

Customer experience (CX) is a crucial component of a financial institution’s success. A strong strategy consists of defining business objectives, determining the functionality requirements to meet these objectives, and the necessary technological innovation and infrastructure.

Step 1: Customer Delivery Business Model

A successful customer delivery model engages earlier and across the entire customer journey to expand and acquire insights. This approach fosters transparency and collaboration across all channels, seamlessly combining automation with human interaction. It focuses on avoiding channel shifting, detecting and retargeting abandonment, offering personalized interactions, and providing financial education and guidance while managing risk.

Step 2: Functional Scope

To deliver an exceptional experience, essential functions must be in place. For example, customer engagement functionality identifies prospect and customer needs providing relevant and personalized communication throughout the customer journey. Omni-channel collaboration supports re-purposed branch roles by equipping bankers with insights gathered from both human and digital interactions.

Other necessary functionality includes:

• Fulfillment, abandonment retargeting, and onboarding: Provide products and services in the customer’s channel of choice, from anywhere, at any time without a need to channel shift.
• Education and financial planning: Advise and guide customers on their journey to financial wellness.
• Risk detection: Mitigate fraud, credit, and new customer accounts with controls based on an array of best practices aligned to delivery channels, both physical and digital.
• Expanded management insight KPIs: Offset the loss of customer insight from digital access and equip the organization to make data-driven decisions.
• Voice of Customer: Capture and measure customer sentiment at critical moments of truth across the customer journey.
• Sales and Sales Management: Increase staff performance by empowering them to optimize customer contact success.

Step 3: Technological Innovation Infrastructure

Advanced analytics and workflow-driven technology form the foundation for closing the customer experience gap.

Necessary technologies include:

• Sensory: Behavior detection across all stages of the customer journey.
• Omni-channel architecture: Cross-channel collaboration and transparency between digital and physical channels and a responsive interface in serving customers.
• Analytics: Quantification and threshold analysis of prescriptive and predictive indicators such as purchase propensity, customer value index, predictive attrition risk, customer and fraud risk, and supporting KPIs for management insight.
• Process workflow: Deposit and credit fulfillment, service requests, engagement, and Voice of Customer programs.
• Decisioning: Engagement relevance, risk-based pricing, and delivery unit cost optimization.
• Listening: Identification of critical customer needs and touchpoints to measure customer experience through surveys and predictive analytics
• Data and event-driven actions: Enriched customer data platform to inform activity and engagement
• Document-driven workflow: Paperless and e-signature workflow and compliance
• Risk detection: A risk framework balancing risk mitigation and delivering efficiencies without too much friction
• Interoperability integration: Timeliness, insight, cost/efficiency, and data and event drive access and action

This three-part strategy equips financial institutions to deliver a customer-centric, frictionless experience that increases satisfaction and drives business results in today’s digital-first world.

For more information download our white paper: "Innovation Drives Customer Engagement Best Practices."