The Covid-19 pandemic has been both a challenging and transformational experience for banks or credit unions. The financial institutions have made investments in digital capabilities to improve digital customer experience.  Similarly, the pandemic has forced them to rethink and redesign their business operations, services, and products. Here are five ways that digitization is revolutionizing the consumer journey in fintech businesses.

Financial institutions switched to remote working modes of sales, digital outreach, and customer care to assure business continuity. In the current scenario every industry, including banking and financial institutions change their strategy. Some of them include the constantly changing terrain, cutting-edge competition, and rising client demands are a general thumb rule to get adapted.  Consequently, several insurance banking service providers must stay up with new developments in order to give timely service to their customers.

In banking, customer experience (CX) is an integral part of any strategy approach to meeting consumer demands. Financial institutions and banks must undergo digital transformation in order to provide a uniform banking experience, whether online or in person. Personalization at scale is enabled by digital banking, resulting in revenue increase of 5 to 15% for financial services organizations.

Why is a digital customer experience or digitalization necessary?

The customer experience refers to all of your efforts to make each client feel special when they contact your banking institution. It’s also the sum of a user’s perceptions of all encounters throughout the trip.

According to the Digital Banking Report, the first priority for financial service providers is to “improve the overall client experience in banking.” Banks that invest in digital customer experience trends have higher recommendation rates. Additionally, they enjoy larger wallet share, and are more likely to upsell or cross-sell services to existing customers.

The consumer journey of today is channel agnostic. Customers can begin by visiting the website, going to their mobile device, chatting with a bot, or calling a customer service professional. Regardless of the channel, the client wants the same experience throughout the customer journey, even if their touchpoints are different. It’s critical for credit unions or banks to focus on meeting this omnichannel requirement rather than enhancing just one channel.

The use of AI chatbots is now on the rise prior to the outbreak. Customers and members will focus on self-service platforms to reduce risks. Chatbots have shown to be a dependable source of self-service skills.

Chatbots, for example, can be enhanced to deliver relevant offers to customers and centrally handle requests across channels. It allows  individuals to have a contextually appropriate interaction at any time, across devices and interfaces.  This is due to the innovations in machine learning and AI.

Top trends in banking to improve digital customer experience

Digital customer experience is a difficult environment for financial institutions to negotiate in today’s banking sector. This is the consequence of the demands of the digitalization era. The issues of digital banking CX are growing by the day and embracing new trends will help banks execute digital customer experience.

1. Seamless Onboarding:

First impressions matter a lot when it comes to building a trustworthy banking relationship. With increasing competition, retaining customers requires a strong initial onboarding process. Traditional onboarding procedures are time-consuming, inefficient, and paper-intensive. According to Deloitte research, at least 38% of customers abandon the onboarding process due to the lengthy process.
The pandemic underlined the importance of a streamlined digital onboarding process that adapts to the changing environment. Banks wish to provide positive experience for the customers and members. This is when they contact their preferred banking provider via their preferred channel and receive the information and support they require.
To provide a personal touch to customer onboarding, banks and credit unions are using an innovative blend of mobile, video, and web services. Video technology is being used by financial organisations such as BBVA Switzerland to verify and enable “zero touch” Know Your Customer (KYC) checks for new users.

2. Proactive customer engagement for improved financial management

Experts worry about the consequences of recessions with rising unemployment interest rates as we move toward a post-Covid future. Credit unions and banks must focus on improving customer journeys, with an emphasis on individualised financial suggestions.
In personal finance management, artificial intelligence will be critical. According to an Oracle poll, 85 percent of corporate leaders want robots to assist them with financial responsibilities. In the next five years, 56 percent of respondents predict robots would replace banking professionals.

How can banks benefit from proactive client engagement?

A. Educate clients – By providing good customer education, banking institutions can better educate their customers about products and services, allowing them to make smarter financial decisions.
B. Notify customers – To keep their consumers informed about their transactions, banks might send out notifications about bills, application progress, and announcements.
C. Banks can proactively collect customer feedback in order to discover and comprehend the gaps between clients and banks.

3. Offer live support

Mapping your banking customer journey is an excellent method to learn more about your customers’ going through. It can assist banks in discovering common customer complaints, gaining insights into how to improve the customer journey. Additionally, they can identify the touchpoints clients have with your bank, and better understanding customer expectations. Understanding the customer journey mapping can assist banks in providing excellent and consistent customer service regardless of the touchpoint your client requires. With advanced features like co-browsing and video chat, you may provide live assistance based on customer issues.

Banks can give speedier, real-time solutions to their consumers by utilising visual customer engagement. Improve customer resolution time — By working with clients in real time, bank representatives can assist consumers in navigating the tedious banking application process.
Reduce the sales cycle – Having direct touch with consumers allows you to identify the problem better and provide appropriate solutions on the first contact.
Number of touchpoints – By identifying the problem at the initial touchpoint, live support aids in the delivery of an accurate solution.
ICICI Bank is a wonderful example of how to improve customer service in the banking industry. They were able to: Simplify the form filling procedure, which comprised several touchpoints and numerical errors, by utilising the advanced co-browsing solution.
The bank has reduced average operating time by 50%, raised client satisfaction by 65 percent, and boosted contract completion rate by 62 percent.

4. Prioritize a seamless omnichannel customer experience

Today’s customers like to interact with brands through multiple platforms. Whether consumers utilise a website, a smartphone app, a contact centre, a bank branch, or another medium, they can execute the same banking procedures.
According to studies, digital channels are becoming less important each year, yet nearly half of clients desire branch operations as well. The research also states that in banking, outstanding customer service is providing the same level of service across channels, both offline and online. Providing an omnichannel banking consumer experience entails providing customers with a consistent set of services across all offline and digital channels.

Real-time data synchronisation between different channels is also possible with the omnichannel banking platform. For example, customers can begin the onboarding process with one channel and end it with another without having to supply the same information multiple times. Today’s banks aim to provide an exceptional client experience by providing a complete consumer journey and engagement. It’s the sequence of events that clients go through when they interact with your business or brand. It could carry on for a long time after a client has purchased a product or created a new account.

Following the creation of the path map, determine to what extent the present customer experience meets customer expectations.
A. What are the areas that need to be improved?
B. What improvements might be possible?

Indeed, at each point of the customer journey, client needs, actions, motivations, and obstacles to action should be considered. What, for example, drove that persona to take that action? What would entice them to continue on to the next leg of the journey? What potential stumbling blocks might they encounter?

Understanding your customer’s banking journey is critical to providing a positive experience

Using a digital experience platform to improve customer experience in financial services. Similarly, it states 87 percent of companies consider digital transformation a major strategic challenge. Maintaining high-quality digital portals necessitates significant resources, which many businesses lack.

Digital journey platforms in the financial services industry enable organisations to:

A. Speed up transformation by optimizing platform technologies
B. Add agility to existing systems with a component of customer-centric, agile applications built for better customer experience
C. Improve customer experience to deliver best-in-class digital experiences without lengthy development

Takeaway

Using a digital journey builder to enhance the digital customer experience allows businesses to develop great consumer-facing apps swiftly. It’s hard to meet all of your digital transformation objectives or completely reimagine your digital consumer experience in a single day. The ideal plan is to find the correct tools, like digital journey builders and platforms, to help you get there faster and offer the experience your customers expect.