Best practice guide
A date with data
The best practice guide to customer experience in banking and financial services
In this best practice guide
Pressure to perform
In the current economic environment, retail banks and legacy consumer-facing financial service providers face a four-fold challenge: higher operating costs, fewer — if any — meaningful prospects for growth, increasing and increasingly costly regulation, and decreasing customer loyalty.
And of course, these challenges are in addition to the continuing digitalization of the market that has already ushered in competition in the form of open banking, fintechs and neobanks and is about to create even more industry disruption with the arrival of generative AI.
Interest rates are limiting demand for many financial products and inflation is increasing operating costs and pushing more consumers towards delinquency. Now factor in that digital startups are better able to offer products and services that reflect consumers’ current needs and it’s clear that established brands in the sector have no choice but to double down on CX. It’s the only means of navigating the current market and doing so with minimal customer attrition.
Just as in 2020, your customers need you to step up in terms of the levels of help and support you can provide to get them through this period of uncertainty. And that means your organization needs to deliver a genuine, representative customer experience — one that reflects these needs and expectations — that feels tailored to each customer query rather than to a financial product or service category.
But of course, thanks to continued digitalization, the goal posts have moved again, meaning that for many brands, it’s not simply a case of building on the foundation laid over the course of the pandemic.
Nevertheless, by using customer needs and expectations as the cypher for decoding the current situation, the competitive threat of fintechs should start to diminish, and, more importantly, technological breakthroughs such as generative AI will cease to seem like challenges or threats and start looking like opportunities to move closer to your customers.
And this change of perspective all starts with data.