Managing customer experience in a digital age

Relevance of customer experience
Managing customer experience has become a priority for every banking and financial leader in our current digital age. 79 percent of banking, insurance, and fintech CEOs believe customer expectations are shaped by hyper-relevant, real-time and dynamic experiences encountered across the industry. The emergence of new digital technologies and changing customer behavior has contributed immensely in focusing on customer experience in the banking industry.

Emergence of New Threats
The digital revolution has had a significant impact on the Banking and Financial services industry. Earlier banks operated as financial intermediaries relying on brick and mortar branches to engage with their customers and thereby earned their profits. But post-digital revolution, this traditional model is disrupted by digital innovators. FinTech firms emerged as new competitors for traditional banks by offering innovative ways of delivering financial solutions. Technology firms like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon also made forays in the financial services industry, offering alternative financial solutions.

How is Customer Behavior changing?
There has been a symbolic shift in customer preferences and behavior in the present digital age due to the rapid expansion of mobile and internet connectivity. Customers want relevant advice and product information at their fingertips as they go about their daily lives. Most customers are less and less likely to care about which channel they use to communicate with their financial services provider. Customers want quick and easy access to service offerings. Customers are not only embracing a do-it-yourself (DIY) model - they are also demanding it.

What is the Current State of Customer Experience?
Banks have responded to these threats from digital innovators and changes in customer behavior by redesigning their operating model leveraging digital platform solutions. Banks have started offering products across multiple channels in anticipation to meet customer demands. But there is a fundamental problem with this product or channel-centric view of the banks. These omni-channel digital offerings have radically changed the way banks engage with their customers and they have far deeper ramifications on the overall customer experience.

Today a client experiences a wide variety of service levels across different channels. While there is a spectrum of offerings across different channels, ironically clients have limited choices within a channel. Clients often find themselves caught in a hapless situation during inter-department handoffs.

Moreover, clients get overwhelmed by technological features and lose sight of the core product offering. Although clients are inundated with data and notifications, they are not aware of the information they are seeking.

Currently, the customer journey is marred by various issues leaving a bad taste in the customer’s mouth. Some of the issues and their impact on the customers are:

• Complex and confusing paths are making the customer journey susceptible to misinterpretation.

• Repetitive and redundant steps are making the customer journey frustrating.

• Limited ability to monitor and track requests are making customer anxious.

• Channels and departments operating in silos focusing on individual KPIs are not aligning with the end-customer’s expectations.

• Benefits of faster turnaround and better service quality at individual touchpoints are getting forfeited due to delays at inter-department handoffs.

• Failure demand or missing SLAs are resulting in a bitter customer experience.

These harrowing journeys contribute to unpleasant customer experiences and eventually results in customer churn. There is, therefore, an urgent need for banks to revisit their existing customer journey and take mitigating measures to transform the customer experience.

How to comprehend real customer experience?
To understand the customer experience, banks need to take a holistic view of end-to-end customer journey from an end-customer perspective. Customer experience is an aggregation of all the interactions a customer has throughout their lifecycle with the organization. Hence, organizations need to focus on a customer’s cumulative experience across multiple touchpoints and channels over time. Banks need to avoid driving disassociated improvement initiatives at individual department levels. Analyzing end-to-end customer journeys cutting across different departments will enable banks to uncover the root cause of customer dissatisfaction and define expected outcomes.

What is a holistic approach for managing customer experience?
Service Blueprinting is an excellent toolkit, which banks can utilize to analyze customer journeys and create a distinctive and satisfying customer experience. Service Blueprinting is a customer-focused approach to map the customer journey. In this approach, processes that constitute the customer journey of target customers are graphically depicted along with a sequence of user actions, service response and touchpoints that enables service relationship.

• The following steps outline an approach to mapping customer journey utilizing Service Blueprinting:
  
  • Establish Goal: Determine the goal of the Service Blueprinting and define the scope of the customer journey of the service offering.
  
  
  • Identify Personas: Identify different personas (representative user type) from the customer population. Define attributes, behavior, needs, and expectations of each persona.
  
  
  • Map customer journey: Map end to end-customer journey for the identified persona from the end-customer perspective. Include user actions and service responses from onstage and backstage staff at different stages of the customer journey. Capture the customer’s state of mind along the customer journey.
  
  
  • Identify Gap: Determine customer satisfaction level across different stages of the customer journey. Discover gaps between actual and expected customer experience and their associated reasons.
  
  
  • Optimize Journey: Simplify and streamline the customer journey. Prioritize actions based on the gap in customer satisfaction and relative customer importance.
  
  
  • Enhance Experience: Gather customer insights from the customer journey maps. Design solutions and interfaces to enhance customer experience and empower customer.

Application of customer journey maps to manage customer experience
Let us examine the customer journey leveraging Service Blueprinting for the issuance of the new debit card. Consider the case of a customer who urgently needs a new bank account and debit card which allows him to transact free of charge at the atm network nearby.

Following are the key insights from the customer journey map of issuance of new debit card:

• The Customer can use the debit card only after the 15th day of submitting the application.

• Customer experience is positive at the start of the journey until he visits the branch to submit supporting documents and his experience deteriorates thereafter.

• The Customer is unaware of application status at multiple instances which makes him anxious.

• Customer must visit the branch to check the application status.

• Branch staff struggles to find information about the online application.

• The Debit card is not accompanied by the welcome kit.

Recommendations:

• Include the list of all the mandatory documents in the acknowledgment email itself.

• Improve data integration between offline (branch) and online channel.

• Send regular notification to the customer on the application status and effective time for fulfillment.

• Dispatch debit card along with a welcome kit.

• Allow the customer to generate the PIN for the debit card by himself.

What are some Best Practices of mapping Customer Journey?
The Customer journey should be mapped from the end customer perspective cutting across departments and channels

• All customer personas should be representative, and it should not represent a non-existent segment. Ensure customer personas are exhaustive and mutually exclusive.

• Clearly state expectations of each persona. Determine customer needs and desires.

• Focus on the moments that matter most to clients. Develop a comprehensive understanding of client needs and behaviors across segments and channels to identify the moments that matter to each client.

• Focus on providing an autonomous customer experience. Provide customer choice giving them a sense of control.

• Prioritize improvement based on customer importance, customer experience gap, and operational cost.

• Involve stakeholders from a broad cross-functional team to map the customer journey.

• The Customer journey map is a living document and it should be reviewed at regular intervals.

What are the benefits of managing Customer Experience leveraging Customer Journey maps?
Customer journey maps help the organization:

• Discover bottlenecks and key issues along the customer journey.

• Streamline and simplify customer journeys.

• Discover customer state of mind at different touch points.

• Develop a deep understanding of customer needs and expectations.

• Benchmark their customer experience and business operations.

• Drive improvements which deliver the best customer experience.

• Empower their customer by offering more controls to them.

Enhanced customer experience will improve customer satisfaction which will enable banks to retain their customer. A win for the business, win for the customer!