Establishing an ethos of continually optimizing customer journeys through data is the starting point in digital transformation for the financial services sector. The process design starts with analyzing customer transactions for end-to-end identification of value delivery. In the modern context, it may consist of a series of discrete steps including the customer process for: opening a bank account, entering into a financial product agreement, and using an account to conduct banking operations. By continually engaging customers at each touchpoint to deliver “fintech innovation at scale” it builds a foundation of trust in the relationship.
We’ve identified the key areas that banks should consider for a fintech based customer experience strategy:
1: Digitizing customer-journey design and delivery
The goal is to build a more robust and user-friendly experience by understanding customer pain points and solutions in a way that allows for improved satisfaction metrics (net PS). By including a data pipeline as part of the transaction engagement, especially through the use of advanced behavioral analytics, institutions can reduce not only frictional barriers in accessing products but enable a seamless digital-banking user experience (UX).
2: Digitizing customer-payments-processing and compliance
To simplify processes, fintechs can build onto the existing regulatory frameworks with notable recent changes, such as Basel III, to improve the efficiency of processes and the quality of customer transactions. Note that quality here is defined not in the context of absolute yield but weighted towards the degree of perceived risk in a financial transaction.
Consider the facets of risk management during non-transactional touchpoints such as behavior deltas in responses to product recommendations versus historical averages. What has changed for the client, externally that can be identified?
Amazon’s data infrastructure is often critiqued in being able to perceive potential changes in lifestyle such as marriages, pregnancies, and vacation.
3: Improving the customer experience through design thinking.
Design thinking is an iterative, agile-driven approach to land a minimum viable product or service that continually evolves with customer feedback. This is the mindset behind many of the fintechs’ successful digital-lending models. Customers expect not only competitive rates for financial products but a technology stack that competes with benchmarks led on by new entrants such as Apple Pay.
Most of all, insightful recommendations tailored for unique financial needs, and delivered through a dashboard app, puts the control back into clients hands.
This [agile] is the approach taken by leading fintechs, such as Credit Karma and D2P (decentralized-to-peer) provider MakerDAO. These companies take a “design thinking forward” perspective—they plan for the future, architect for seamless value delivery, and then test and refine the customer journey.
Optimizing customer-relationship-management (CRM) experience
Digitizing the customer-engagement experience requires a deep understanding of pain points, technology solutions, as well as an identification of the cost and complexity of digital-banking operations. Digitizing this process can significantly reduce the time required to complete certain tasks, such as real time sales engagement with customers for tailored support in the funnel.
Live video sharing apps have opened a new leapfrog opportunity to deliver personalized banking support to make the most out of products
Paring this data pipeline of experiences (X data) with transactional operational data (O data) can bring about insightful recommendations. Internally, banks must make this accessible to front-line considered as “banking experience advisors” to continually identify the customer-journey improvements possible.
Digitizing engagement presents one of the biggest opportunities for banks. A CRM system that provides a single view of the relationship with a behavior profile will allow advisors to directly impact customer churn reduction and protect against transactional risk. It also provides a potential value of a customer relationship, wherein it may need follow-up sales processes.
CRM systems that are modular and reusable to integrate data pipeline APIs across touchpoints, such as mobile banking apps, third-party payment services, will allow for a comprehensive 360-degree perspective.
Improving the customer-experience design and delivery
Fintech leaders must recognize that a digital transformation strategy focused on customer-journey design and delivery requires a commitment to build a credible growth engine. Digital-banking platforms do this by improving the experience and structuring the operating model using a flexible approach that encompasses all the activities involved along the customer journey.
Secondly, integrating data pipelines require a new value chain maximizing “culture” and new processes to manage the customer relationship with integrity, not sales pressure.
Financing the fintech growth engine
Far to often, we’ve identified investment allocators use a perspective of absolute returns with quantitative metrics opposed to the qualitative brand equity development. After all, the resilience of financial institutions depend on a trust based relationship with clients and merchants.
A successful strategy needs to be backed by long-term commitment to failure, one where agile experiences deployed will collect negative customer feedback, continually refine the process, until the most impact can be created. Leaders also need to take perspective of the approach as experimental and not a direct competitive playbook to existing banking operations.
Get in touch to learn how we can deliver user experiences that empower your banking advisors to create value for clients and enhance technical foundations.
