Every time someone comes in contact with your brand, their experience should be excellent; customers should know and trust your brand.
But building trust with your customer base isn’t something that happens overnight. It comes from consistently providing customers with the product or support they need when they need it.
Seventy-four percent of banks consider customer experience to be their greatest strategic priority, but how many actually deliver? Given that 42 percent of customers don’t know which brands to trust, there’s a real opportunity here to differentiate your bank’s brand by providing a superlative experience.
There are many journeys a customer can take with your bank. Your goal should be to anticipate each customer’s needs and design experiences that deeply consider their points of view. In order to do this at every touchpoint, everyone in your organization has to be committed to the customer and meeting their needs.
Here are three strategies to help you locate places where you’re meeting customer expectations and where you may find room for improvement.
1. Map Your Customer Journeys
To find gaps, map out your customer journeys, starting with the points where your customers enter your marketing flywheel through to becoming a customer – and beyond. To assess how you’re doing, you’ll need to choose a specific path and position yourself in your customer’s shoes.
For example, go to your bank’s website with the goal of filling out a loan application online. Do you find any of the instructions confusing? Was there information you weren’t prepared to furnish when you sat down to start filling out the form?
Take this process as far as you can and record your impressions along the way. Then, map out key steps and benchmarks in the customer experience. Consider who the key stakeholders at these stages are internally, as well as key influencers, good and bad.
2. Target Moments of Transition
As you look for ways to improve the customer experience, target moments of transition. There’s often friction in transitions: from pre-transaction to transaction, post-transaction to customer engagement at the most basic product level. These can be moments of doubt or uncertainty for the customer, which makes them even more crucial to get right.
In moments of transition, providing appropriate resources and transparency about what’s coming next is key. But it’s also important to make sure your team has all the information they need on the back end to put the customer at ease.
For example, many banks find that there are gaps in transitional moments, in places where the customer and their information are handed over between departments. If that’s what you find, consider asking:
- Are all the financial terms being used clear and understandable?
- Are our expectations for the customer’s experience of this event aligned across teams?
This will give you insight into how to provide a more consistent level of service to your customers and lead to concrete process improvements.
3. Use Cross-Functional Teams to Turn Feedback into Solutions
Don’t just rely on your UX experts. Gather people from different areas in your company to get feedback from cross-functional teams to take your journey map from test-drive to optimization.
Make sure these teams span every department and that everyone has a chance to share their insights. Whatever their job title, everyone has ideas for how things can improve. And all of them will have a different appreciation for the customer’s experience of your products and services.
Getting a fresh set of eyes from inside your company is a great way to uncover quick wins and internal process gaps that can be bridged without a major infrastructural change.
Communication Is Critical
Customers should feel that they are moving through a transparent process and understand their location at all times.
Your team should be consistently available to customers in the event that they have questions. The communication customers receive should be hyper-personalized, human and relevant to their experience of your brand.
At the end of the day, people want to do business with other people. They want to do business with people they trust and brands they trust; to get there, put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
