Mind the gap in digital banking: A unique user experience to remove the CX Disconnect
The Lloyds Bank “M-Word” advertising campaign last year highlighted the taboo subject of money. This year sees First Direct playing a more active role in the financial wellness conversation. Specifically talking about money. It’s a sensitive topic. But so is the conversation about digital banking. When customers talk about money, you can bet your bottom dollar (or pound) they’re also going to talk about experiences they have with the bank. Whether it’s a digital experience, one on the high street or over the phone.
Customers want to stay up to date with changes on their bank accounts. They want to apply for services like an ISA, mortgage or credit card without any hassle. They want to be kept up to date with where they are in the process. And they want all this at a time convenient to them.
Consumers Demanding Improved Digital Banking Customer Engagement
Banks have a long way to go to satisfy consumers who want to manage their money digitally, easily and fast. The Amazon driven customer wants instant gratification. They want to see where their package is at any stage of their delivery and can’t understand why they can’t see the progress of their new account, loan or mortgage application in the same way. This experience gap is costly. Lost sales, lost customers to the competition and an overall bad digital experience (which gets talked about). All of these can produce attrition over time. Especially when it’s easier than ever to switch accounts and the incentives to do so are ever more enticing.
A series of disjointed communications leaves customers waning. Improving the customer experience seems simple, right? You invest in the departments that face your customers – marketing, sales and service – but the reality is your customer experience doesn’t just depend on the people dealing with customers every day. No. It depends heavily on processes and technology. And the people behind the scenes – IT people.
For many banks, well not just banks, in many organisations, there’s a huge gap between customer facing departments and IT. Customer-facing people seem to be on a totally different page from IT people. So when someone in the contact centre flags a broken process that only technology can fix, their request gets ignored. That’s not because IT doesn’t care, it’s because they have a thousand and one other things to do. They can’t drop everything to solve one small problem.
Then there’s the frustration of relying on external resources for technical developments. Tasks that don’t seem particularly challenging that are slow to action and don’t always match the initial business requirements. And the associated price tags can often be unreasonable.
But when it comes to customer experience, small problems add up. If a customer can’t apply for a mortgage because your app is broken, that’s annoying. When they can’t get through to customer services because your lines are busy, that’s infuriating. And when they don’t receive a response via email, that’s…well, that may be the end of the relationship.
We call this the CX Disconnect.
Bridging the gap in digital banking
Digital transformation in financial services goes beyond just providing consumers with an online or mobile account-opening solution. Banks should build a process that connects with the consumer before an account is even opened and continues throughout the entire customer journey, at the optimal times of communication and on the device(s) preferred.
Revolutionising customer’s behaviour, expectations and needs which combines digital speed and convenience with human interactions. All of which is crucial to the digital customer journey and adds extra points for nurturing your customers. This engagement process should improve the customer experience on an ongoing basis.
Every engagement should collect insights the institution can leverage for future communications, creating loyalty that will be hard to penetrate. Done well, digital engagement should not just represent a great communications process, but should reflect changes in the back office that simplify all stages of engagement. Most importantly, these stages should connect seamlessly across channels, eliminating the need to visit a branch while allowing consumers to switch channels when desired.
A better way for digital banking
The good news is that there is another, better way for banks.
Bring your customer-facing and IT people together. And give them the tools they need to solve customer experience problems as one team.
Business users create the applications that solve the problems. IT is consulted to ensure new processes meet compliance, security and quality standards. Developers get involved in rare instances where sophisticated solutions are required.
Liberty Create unites your innovators to improve customer experience, fast and changes everything.
The likes of specialists Hampshire Trust Bank knew that they could do things better themselves. They began to search for a way to utilise the knowledge within the business, without hiring an army of developers. Read how HTB formed a small team to build the systems they need and manage process improvement at their own speed, using low-code.
Nationwide has been “living the dream” with low-code for a number of years now. They’ve deployed many highly successful systems using Liberty Create across the business, including Mortgages, ISAs, Bereavements and Complaints. More recently the Account Switching unit applied a similar approach using Create, deployed in just a few weeks and generated a 79% increase in account switches. Read more about Nationwide’s story.
Eager to get in on the action and Try Create for yourself? Let’s go…
Richard Billington
Chief Technology Officer
Richard is our resident sports nut. Having played football and volleyball at a semi-professional level, he now coaches his son’s football team (the mighty Bromham Under 11s), and will happily watch any sport that’s going on TV – except motorsports.
In the rare moments Richard isn’t doing/watching/coaching sport, he loves to settle down with a romcom and a nice glass of red, and regularly hits the music festival circuit. Whether it’s Adele, Stormzy or The Cure, if it’s live, he’s up for it!
