3 Tips to Simplify Your Customer Experience

Neil Titcomb of Odigo shares three tips for simplifying your customer experience, with a special focus on the finance industry.

The UK’s financial industry is packed with disruptive players that are changing the way customers and, indeed, businesses conduct banking today.

New fintech startups like Monzo, Starling and Revolut are setting new standards for customer experience (CX) and that’s exactly what is winning them more and more customers.

Provide a great experience and people will come back. More to the point: provide a great experience and people will pass it on by recommending you to their friends and family.

The New Era of Channel-Less CX

One of the real challenges that this shift-change has presented for the more ‘traditional’ financial institutions is how to become millennial-friendly with your customer experiences.

Some disruptive fintech start-ups are doing it extremely well and reaping the rewards as a result, leaving others fearing the worst about getting left behind.

At the end of the day, it comes down to providing memorable customer experiences that make a positive impact on people’s lives – that’s what generates the kind of longevity required to be a success in financial services, customer-facing or otherwise.

The products might be forward-thinking and intuitive, but the one major reason why they work is because they provide services that fit seamlessly into their customers’ lives.

If you’re looking to make changes to your approach to CX in order to compete with such products, there are some lessons to be learned from them.

Here are three ways you can combat fintech start-ups by creating simple, seamless experiences for your customers.

1. Serve People Where They Want to Be Served

Being active on the right channels means identifying and understanding where your customers like to live their online lives.

We’re past the point of marketing to all channels at once as a catch-all just in case somebody finds you on there. We’re now well and truly in the era of marketing on the right channels at the right time – or, in other words, being where your customers expect you to be.

If you’re active on the channels your customers simply aren’t, your time, money and effort will be squandered and your customers will potentially be neglected.

A robust cloud contact solution ensures that you get the most out of the channels that matter to your customers so you can get the most out of each and every engagement.

2. Provide a Connected and Convenient Service

The customer expectation that a brand will be where they want it to be precisely when they need to reach out is one of the driving forces of CX today.

Customers in one particular industry might be more inclined to contact brands on Facebook Messenger, so that’s where they’ll primarily want to be served, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t expect the same level of joined-up service when they pick up the phone – or vice versa. The experience should pick up where it left off.

Convenience is the crux of it. Simply giving your customers more choice won’t cut it, but giving them an easier choice that sits comfortably and naturally alongside the other customer experiences in their lives (think online shopping, ordering taxis, booking holidays) will give you more of a chance of connecting with them in a longer-lasting manner when it comes to organizing their finances.

A channel-less approach ensures that you can provide the most connected experience possible for both your customers and your agents, which will mean you can rightfully challenge fintech start-ups in the industry.

3. Don’t Be “Revolutionary”… Take an Evolutionary Approach Instead

The companies that provide the best customer experiences have set themselves up to evolve with changing customer behaviours – and we all know how quickly those can change in financial services.

This means that they won’t have to reinvent the way they serve their customers after six, eight or 10 years. Thanks to constant learning and analysis of their customer base, they can rely on the innovative technology that is built into their business to adapt to their market surroundings as they inevitably evolve.

It’s one of the reasons why fintech start-ups have been able to penetrate the financial industry so effectively here. Their technologies have been so ideally suited to their customers’ needs that the transition to them made perfect sense to younger generations crying out for something that’s more in tune with their lifestyles.

The World Retail Banking Report 2019 by Capgemini and Efma showed that more than 60% of customers already use or plan to try banking products from alternative banks within the next three years, so it’s crucial that traditional banks act now to avoid losing customers to more customer-friendly challengers.

Future-Proofing Your CX

Neil Titcomb

The challenge now lies at the doorstep of traditional financial institutions to bring their customer experiences in line with the new normal set by fintech start-ups for their tech-savvy customers.

If the evolution isn’t recognized, customers will be unsatisfied and eventually lost, and the business will ultimately fail to grow.

Author: Odigo