The importance of customer experience in financial services
30 September 2015
Service Design. Journey Maps. Customer Stories. Mood Boards. Experience Recovery. These are a handful of the topics discussed at this week’s Customer Experience for Financial Services (CXFS) Conference, organized by Worldwide Business Research in Charlotte, NC. As an analyst currently immersed in research on corporate banking financial performance, regulatory environment, economic conditions, business demographics, and financial technology, the CXFS event was a welcome change of scenery. [caption id="attachment_5209" align="alignleft" width="768"]
Journey Mapping[/caption] The CXFS conference was all about the “voice of the customer" (VoC) and how financial institutions (FIs) can improve their customer “listening” skills. One of the sessions mentioned that FIs are listening to anywhere from four to ten channels including web site, call center, e-mail, Internet, customer surveys and social media. But as one presenter stated, having more VoC channels doesn’t automatically result in a better customer experience. For example, in recent years many global banks fully integrated their major lines of business with product, operations and technology grouped organized under one segment leader. These integrated groups have created silos which create a highly verticalized client experience (CX), preventing consistency across a firm. Event attendees were encouraged to “climb over the silos and create a collective story to make things change”. Customer experience strategy and technology have gone a long way since I was involved in online banking user interface design in the early 2000s. Technology providers at the event are enabling banks to digitize and tag unstructured data such as call center recordings, agent notes, e-mails, and social media posts. This enables firms to mine and analyze the data to inform customer-centric innovation. Other firms specialized in market research including voice of the customer and voice of the employee surveys. Customer experience consultants are helping firms to understand how customers are thinking, feeling, seeing, saying doing and hearing so that people, processes, products and technology can be improved. The event featured discussions on how to build CX into people, processes and products by creating centralized information stores, centers of excellence, customer councils, and shared KPIs. Most of the FIs at CXFS were early in their customer experience journey and still working out a comprehensive solution. My favorite quote of the event was advice from Ingrid Lindberg, CXO of ChiefCustomer.com: “Have the patience of a saint, the heart of a lion, and the tenacity of a street fighter because it is one giant game of Whack-a-Mole.”
Journey Mapping[/caption] The CXFS conference was all about the “voice of the customer" (VoC) and how financial institutions (FIs) can improve their customer “listening” skills. One of the sessions mentioned that FIs are listening to anywhere from four to ten channels including web site, call center, e-mail, Internet, customer surveys and social media. But as one presenter stated, having more VoC channels doesn’t automatically result in a better customer experience. For example, in recent years many global banks fully integrated their major lines of business with product, operations and technology grouped organized under one segment leader. These integrated groups have created silos which create a highly verticalized client experience (CX), preventing consistency across a firm. Event attendees were encouraged to “climb over the silos and create a collective story to make things change”. Customer experience strategy and technology have gone a long way since I was involved in online banking user interface design in the early 2000s. Technology providers at the event are enabling banks to digitize and tag unstructured data such as call center recordings, agent notes, e-mails, and social media posts. This enables firms to mine and analyze the data to inform customer-centric innovation. Other firms specialized in market research including voice of the customer and voice of the employee surveys. Customer experience consultants are helping firms to understand how customers are thinking, feeling, seeing, saying doing and hearing so that people, processes, products and technology can be improved. The event featured discussions on how to build CX into people, processes and products by creating centralized information stores, centers of excellence, customer councils, and shared KPIs. Most of the FIs at CXFS were early in their customer experience journey and still working out a comprehensive solution. My favorite quote of the event was advice from Ingrid Lindberg, CXO of ChiefCustomer.com: “Have the patience of a saint, the heart of a lion, and the tenacity of a street fighter because it is one giant game of Whack-a-Mole.”Comments
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I would argue that building CX into products should be top priority. At its most basic, product design needs to focus on the end user, rather than focusing on an organization's (often limited) capabilities. In banking, there's an opportunity to design user interfaces and interactions that are easy to learn and use, whether by a consumer or corporate treasurer. Banks too often cut usability corners due to complexity or cost, only to find themselves with products that decrease customer satisfaction and are difficult to support.
I'm curious about building CX into people, process, and product:
"The event featured discussions on how to build CX into people, processes and products by creating centralized information stores, centers of excellence, customer councils, and shared KPIs."
Could you explain this in some more detail? I totally agree. I'm just curious about some of the details.