Displaying search results for ""

Home > Customer Experience > Page 6

Eight ways to improve customer experience (CX) in 2022

Eight ways to improve customer experience (CX) in 2022

The last three years have surfaced momentous CX lessons for brands and organizations. While customers connect in omnichannel ways today, the expectations are the same: human touch.

CXOs of leading organizations are keen to ensure that customers have a consistent experience because that augments customer loyalty, increases retention, and turns them into brand advocates.

The opportunities to leverage CX directly relate to a company’s growth. From bringing down friction in their interactions to finding out ‘aha’s’ through Voice of customer programs, CX as an organizational discipline is evolving quickly.

Gartner says 3 out of 4 B2B and 6 out of 10 B2C organizations are yet to move into advanced stages of CX maturity.

Here are ways to improve CX in 2022 radically.

Like most business aspects, technology (its investments and mastery) is key to cultivating winning organizational CX strategies.

Personalize at scale

Most brands want their platforms and products to be available and consistent 24X7, in ways that meet the right customer at the right time. With the growing advent of AI and ML practices, personalization at scale is the way forward for most leading CMOs and CXOs.

Customer data platform investments 

Moving beyond enterprise CRM systems that give customers buying transactional data, digital tools bring customers emotive elements that are insightful about their overall experience. Today’s analytics platforms offer key behaviors that guide the company’s marketing efforts.

Employee experience holds the key.

Correlation studies show how businesses profit when employees’ experiences are given high priority. A happy staff person is a pleasure to interact with. Customers feel a brand positively when passionate employees service them.

Recommendation engines for personal experiences 

As companies learn from Amazon and Netflix how to use their touchpoints to offer product and service recommendations, recommendation engines’ popularity grows. The user data personalizes CX and increases customer spend values perceptibly.

Relationship building before sales and profits

Building customer relationships is one way to simplify the CX complexities (technology and processes). Investments in staff training for capturing customer details and situations to make customers feel special is a definite way to build trust.

Mixed Reality UX

Learning from metaverse-inclined tech giants who create immersive mixed-reality experiences is the next step in the curve. While big data analytics offers savvy UX choices, the differentiation for organizations comes from their ability to amplify the stickiness quotient across the engagement cycle.

After-sales data and processes

The one area where the potential to gain CX points exists is the post-sale touchpoints. While customer acquisition gets full attention from the sales teams, the work begins by examining data after checkout. A follow-up plan that seeks and addresses frictions is crucial to expanding a customer’s lifetime value.

Mining data for anticipating customer needs. 

It is surprising to note that up to half of the customer data is not analyzed or leveraged in ways that unlock customer behavior patterns that can be used to provide the best possible CX strategy. While advanced analytics is needed for data discovery that picks out use cases, it begins with a strong organizational commitment to improving CX.

Conclusion

Staying in step with today’s disruptive forces, businesses must use technology creatively and use CX as a strong barometer (along with profits and shareholder prices) to guide their overall growth strategy.

In the final analysis, becoming customer intelligent will come when companies cultivate an insight competence by combining data lakes, appropriate data science architecture, and exploiting next-generation intelligence (AI and ML).

View

How does Omnichannel Banking Experience Improve CX?

How does Omnichannel Banking Experience Improve CX?

Millennials and Gen Z are today the largest generational demographics in the US, and other regions will soon follow suit. Most consumer-facing industries are elevating (and rewiring ) their systems to respond to the ‘Digital-as-default’ environment. Financial institutions must adopt innovative approaches to woo the younger clientele by developing nuanced offerings that match their habits, expectations, and preferences.  

Will banks have it easy with the Touchscreen Generation?

Bringing in technology will allow the banks to answer the question partly. However, the longer-term answer is not straightforward. Authentic digital experiences (and not features alone) will be a differentiator. Second, along with technology, banking has to become more “human .” How? Banks must realize that tomorrow’s customers are reshaping the finance industry from gamification to meaningful content, accountability to service, and community engagement.

Omni Channel Banking Platform

Given the changing business (and social) landscape, here is how the Omnichannel banking experiences are critical to a bank’s growth potential. 

Leveraging the in-market forces

Omnichannel banking experiences are a natural outcome of today’s market trends. The pandemic forced companies to turn agile, experiment more with AI and Robotic automation (and other cognitive capabilities), and tackle the distributed workplaces (accelerated because of the lockdowns). All these in-market forces compelled financial institutions to turn to the right-channeling – the primary reason behind omnichannel (meeting customers where they are and influencing them through the appropriate channel).

Increase in customer choice and flexibility by numbers 

First, a few statistics. Prominent studies point out that the pandemic has changed customer preferences – 76% now prefer online banking, 46% (up from 15%) are comfortable with video call advisory, and 59% expect on-demand, anywhere, anytime banking services. 50% of High-Net-Worth Individuals under the age of 40 will purely choose virtual advice (compared to 39% overall). The strongest endorsement for omnichannel banking experience comes from the fact reported by Digital banks in the UK: digital banks’ net promoter score (NPS) is 3X that of traditional banks.

Keeping Pace with Digital Evolution

Omnichannel Banking Experiences work best when banks realize they are keeping pace with constant digital evolution. Collecting data from diverse sources (geolocation info, social media feeds, wearable tech, browsing, in-store data, etc.) and then using this to analyze and design a touchpoint strategy to maximize acquisition is the start point for the Omnichannel banking strategy. After that, Banks must transfer customer interactions from physical branches to digital channels by supplemental value. The third step is about delivering a personalized, proactive, and customer-centric experience based on consumer behavior.

The Omnichannel Banking Experience relies on its robust Implementation

By mapping CX journeys and measuring customer traffic, banks must create transparency around user behavior. Next, as optimal online CX journeys are set up (with functional and superior product/landing pages), the bank’s Omnichannel mechanisms show successful outcomes – higher online purchases, easier decision making, and conversion. Banks (and companies) fail digitally when their customers’ real needs and preferences are not captured in omnichannel journeys.

Culture changes needed for Omnichannel Banking

For banks, intent on designing and implementing best-in-class omnichannel services is easier said than done. In a mixed digital-savviness environment (Digital by Lifestyle Vs. by need Vs. choice Vs. offline population), managers and bank employees must embrace new standards of customer orientation. These new standards encompass the principles of agility, transparency, and flexibility. The mindset shift that is high on creative problem solving and continuous improvement is the next step. A meaningful performance measurement system should finally support the culture that best supports the omnichannel banking experience.

Conclusion

Driving a customer-first omnichannel experience in an age when new channels surface every other day is a complex task. To ensure that improvements address customer needs will happen when banks and Fintechs place the customer in the center of their ecosystem. With each passing day, customers will become more tech-savvy, so banks must rise to the challenge by elevating the quality standards of their systems and live agent interactions. This mindset will help them achieve the seamless omnichannel service that separates them from the competition.

 

View

5 Trends for Transforming Digital Customer Experience in Banking

5 Trends for Transforming Digital Customer Experience in Banking

As the world sheltered indoors, customer activity transited online. Enterprise growth strategy – notably the Banks – hurriedly embraced digital customer experience. McKinsey reported how organizations were leapfrogging their digital journeys by four years, and new portfolios that could have stayed on shelves for years started to see accelerated releases.

Experience is everything, and for the Banking sector, the bias for action is more urgent and the penalty for inaction harsher. Because compared to other commodities, when it comes to managing money, speed, convenience, consistency, and a human touch offer instant opportunities of either creating delight or frustrate with oversight.

5 Trends for Transforming Digital CX in Banking

Digital-Human Platforms Tech (Emotional connection is the new customer satisfaction)

Banking growth agendas are tied to impactful and emotionally connected experiences customers crave with a real human being. A study found that 7 out of 10 emotionally connected customers spend twice with brands they’re loyal to, and this ’emotional capital’ can drive a 5% uplift in annual revenue. Challenging the boundaries of machine cognition, AI technology to craft hyper-realistic personalized experiences with real-time speech and behavior will mean bankers must develop deep expertise in use-cases, problem statements, and persona creation. While the game-changing results are early, present-day traction is seen in chatbots, co-browsing solutions, and personal finance management (PFM) solutions.

Automated onboarding is only the start (Every impression is the first impression)

The current-day electronic onboarding processes use automation to expedite the process so that the overall CX is measured in terms of speed and convenience. A great start but inevitably, the conversation shifts to ‘personalization’ – a growth lever that industry studies suggest can lead to annual revenue uplifts to 10%. In the second half of 2022, Fintechs will move from standard personalization (data analytics for targeted marketing and sales messaging) to hyper-personalization (using predictive analytics, AI, and ML to target individuals). The outcome of this “humanizing-digital” approach means banks will employ rich data insights to monitor and offer the latest solutions. Every impression will feel fresh to the customer.

CX teams at the heart of Banking operations (‘To gather,’ Together)

The science of CX in Banks grows phenomenally. The real-time nature of the business – gathering customer perceptions, pain points, and closing feedback loops needs diverse groups adept at business strategy, data, engineering, design, and marketing. To bring insights, learnings, and experiments and get their execution correct, A-list banks – JP Morgan Chase, TD Bank, Capital One, and PNC, to name a few – work through cross-functional CX teams. Built on multiple approaches and iterations, a bank’s dedicated CX team brings unique perspectives and is more likely to create a seamless and impactful omnichannel experience. If the discussion sways, the counter group pulls back the focus on what’s best for the customer.

The experience KPIs (shifting the measures and measuring the shifts)

Given the above trends – forging emotional connections and dedicated CX teams – it is obvious how the current banking metrics of sales, conversion, and the number of leads and prospects must evolve. What are the possible new KPIs? There is a host to choose from – user feedback, total active users, net promoter score, positive and negative comments on social media, app ratings on Google Play and the App Store, Customer lifetime value (CLV), retention, switch rates, and customer loyalty index. The reason is moving from a pure intellect approach to an approach that mixes intuition and emotion. A key CX trend for Banks (especially after the pandemic) is to include empathy and purpose in their brand messaging and overhaul its success parameters.

Looking Beyond the Cookie (first-party data is the first-priority data)

As third-party cookies disappear, organizations scramble to alter their customer identification and targeting processes. Banks are at an advantage. They have long collected and authenticated their digital traffic, which plays a prominent part in providing their financial services. Not so much reliant on third-party data, the leaders in the banking game are not only harvesting customer insight but also assigning high business value to all customer outreach activities. Case in point: Customers with incomplete loan applications take precedence over a routine product inquiry. As behavioral data can heavily predict buying behavior, the more Banks can bring audience affinities into their CX campaigns, the likelier they are to strengthen customer intimacy and consequently grow loyalty.

In sum, Financial services brands offer their customers very personal, impactful products and services – home and automotive loans, start-up capital – expect transformational CX strategies in the sector to evolve at a faster pace than others.

 

View

Digital Customer Experience Strategy 2022: Five Key Areas to Focus your Efforts

Digital Customer Experience Strategy 2022: Five Key Areas to Focus your Efforts

Creating innovative, empathetic experiences across omnichannel forges long-lasting relationships with customers. Forrester predicts pandemic to have boosted digital customer service interactions by 40%. Today, business leaders see seamless and ‘aha’ experiences as the bedrock of their growth strategy. To get good at the customer experience (CX) makes eminent sense given the diversity of customer issues that we face today – emergency, utilities, financial, or psychological needs.

In a volatile economy, where every possible micro-landscape (work or business) shifts without notice, all ‘customer-roads’ lead to one value: Purpose. From workers seeking existential meaning, and activists holding lawmakers accountable for far-ranging issues of climate sustainability, equity, diversity, and inclusion, brands are rewiring their marketing and CX functions to reflect purpose in more profound ways. After all, the race to serve, satisfy, and delight customers are genuinely on.

Over a tumultuous 24-month period, while companies have double-downed on money and efforts to create digital and data powerhouses, the tenuous linkage of technology with Digital customer experience must be clarified.

At the heart of CX are three basics – ‘SEE’ – success (did the customer get what he/she came for?), effort (was the process friction-free?), and emotion (did the exchange elevate?). The seemingly effortless elements do not explain that progressive organizations still miss the mark. Global CX trends report that when experiences don’t meet expectations, the collective losses accumulate to as much as $4.7T annually.

Let’s state two basics before elaborating on broader aspects of CX transformation.

  1. The customer is on 24/7. The businesses also need to.
  2. User experience journeys are rife with lost opportunities due to empathy. That has to change.

 Designing stellar CX Strategic Journeys

A winning CX strategy that brings customer delight must be constructed methodically.

The outside-in perspective begins with awareness. As a customer searches for a brand, product, or service online, brands need to test and create intuitive workflows. The better an organization understands how customers engage, their intentions, and desired outcomes, the more meaningful will be the discovery process. Next in designing a CX strategy comes the critical step of competitor evaluation. After all, we are all comparing all the time.

From profiling points of differentiation across channels, optimizing SEO, managing media, and engaging influencers for the company’s authentic side to shine through, the focus is to win the perception of quality in customers’ minds.

Around this time, a clear definition of success (for example, the customer acquisition costs, conversions, cost to serve) has to be agreed on and communicated across the associated departments of sales, marketing, product, operations, and customer services.

Apart from laying down industry-leading conflict resolution practices, finally, designing a CX strategy necessarily is to work on levers that convert buyers to advocates over time. Fostering customer loyalty and advocacy, primarily through social media, not only nurtures positive brand sentiment but is also about generating valuable real-time insights.

In 2022, focus on these five focal areas for elevating CX. 

View