Impact of CX Transformation in Financial Services

As pioneers of financial industry work towards simplifying complex processes and unifying their products under one umbrella to drive digitisation of traditional products and services, they must not forget to chart the course for driving customer experience, one of the most critical parts of winning, and retaining customers.

Pandemic brought about a tectonic shift in customers’ behaviour and expectations from businesses. In a study commissioned by CINNOX, Forrester conducted a survey of 1,200 consumers from various walks of life. Even though there is a shift in customer behaviour and expectations, the interaction preference is still dominated by their age group and where they are on the customer journey. The best way for financial institutions to stay competitive is to include all interaction options with the capability to deliver quick resolution and knowledgeable services.

Five distinct personas emerged from the surveyed customers:

1. Multichannel Enthusiasts: Aged between 20-49 years, these working adults prefer consistency in communication touchpoints during interactions. They rated both, human and digital touchpoints as equally important.

2. Reserved Digital Immigrants: Adults over 50 years of age, who are drawing low income and are mostly retired from active professional receiving human customer support. 15% of the total respondents fell into this category and were wary of engaging in digital interaction for the fear of safety and security.

3. Affluent High-Touch Seekers: Adults over 50 years of age, who are financially well-off are comfortable with digital touchpoint, but still prefer human support. Respondents under this category were keen on receiving personal touch from in-person interactions. It has also been observed that these respondents showed increased engagement since the dark cloud of pandemic dissipated.

4. Low-Touch Digital Natives: Respondents below 30 years of age weighed digital touchpoints over human, preferring to have consistent communication on digital medium without needing to switch across multiple touchpoints.

5. Omnishoppers: Last but not the least, working adults between 20 to 49 years of age are more lenient when it comes to interacting across both human and digital touchpoints. 49% customers from the study responded that they feel safe with digital interactions and businesses to deliver omnichannel experiences.

What’s interesting to note is that BFSI (Banking, financial services, and insurance) industry has fingers in many pies. It is one of the few industries that has stakes in every other industry. Be it food, construction, automobile, hospitality, or even pharmaceutical; all trades and transactions are driven by products and services offered by various businesses operating in BFSI sector.

With so much at stake, more and more financial institutions are keen to take a more discerning look at their customer experience strategy to provide superior, human-centric, and personalised experiences to their customers.

Identifying and Closing the CX Gap in Finance Industry

Let’s take a look at some of the pain-points that are impeding the growth of FSIs around the world.

1. Manual Authentication (KYC) Process

The importance of KYC processes cannot be argued. But collection, validation, and maintenance of huge pool of customer data can be time consuming. Many businesses still carry out the authentication process manually to this day, which is inefficient to say the least, and can quickly overwhelm your team and the customers.

When businesses have to conduct verification process manually, it leads to disjointed, and unrecorded communication between customers, customer facing team, and the internal processing team. Customer insights gained while conducting the due diligence is lost in the manual process and there is always a chance of inaccurate information finding its way into recorded data.

Seamless Verification Process

The authentication and authorisation process can be conducted seamlessly using CINNOX widget offers the capability to convert live chat into a web call for a 1-to-1 conversation between the customers and the customer support agents. The CX solution also aids businesses to verify customer identity with a video call, without leaving the widget.

2. Lack of Real-time Support

Given the sensitive nature of the products and services of BFSI industry, customer complaints and concerns should be addressed in real-time in order to nip the problem in the bud. Customers can reach out to your support teams with concerns ranging from fraudulent transactions, to receiving unauthorised OTPs on their phones. Lack of real-time support can compromise customer’s security and may even result in losing customers.

Instantaneous Enquiry Redressals

A comprehensive Live chat solution like CINNOX can help businesses in addressing customers’ concerns with its rich visualisation and powerful analytics for incoming enquiries, handling times, and staff productivity.

Managers can use smart routing capability of CINNOX widget to redirect incoming enquiries to suitable agents for faster resolution. Incoming enquiries can also be managed by factoring in the time zones from which it originates and can be pointed to the regional staff directory for enhanced experience.

3. Struggling with Omnichannel Banking and Support

Even though the Banking industry was one of the earliest sectors to adapt and drive digital transformation initiatives to improve their offerings, the pandemic-induced lockdown forced the industry leaders’ hands to speed up the process due to meet customers’ demand for contactless services. Many omnichannel financial institutions have managed to unify their services under one roof, but the same cannot be said for their customer engagement strategy. While some banks struggle to implement new technical infrastructure with enhanced data capabilities to bring all customer interaction data at a granular level under one umbrella, others struggle to unify communication channels.

One-Stop Omnichannel CX Solution

A total experience solution like CINNOX can help Banks to monitor and trace every interaction between customers and employees across multiple touchpoints, and truly unify all interaction data in a centralised system with existing data from the CRM system. When all communications can be seen and managed from one inbox, it not only improves your team’s efficiency, but also eliminates the silos from digital banking experience.

4. Not Enough Measures to Guide Non-Digital Savvy Customers

Let’s look at the following scenario to understand this better.

For this example, we will assume that you are interested in learning about a particular bank’s credit card and what it has to offer. Visit your bank’s website and navigate to the card’s webpage. At this point you must be seeing various credit cards on offer, along with a list of their unique features. But which one serves your purpose? The card with travel points for every transaction? Or the one with heavy discounts for every purchase? What if you are looking for a card that gives you a free lounge access at all international airports, as well as good discounts and cashbacks for every purchase?

When the customers do not find what they are seeking on your website, they are less likely to reach out to you to learn more. Instead, they will move on to check what your competitor has to offer, and once they have left your website, you are more likely to not return.

On top of this, it is important to understand the learning curve of your customers. All customers will not necessarily be digital savvy, they may be used to the traditional approach and would feel lost if they were to visit your website. It is important to have measures in place to guide the non-digital customers to adapt to the transformational solutions.

Proactively Communicate with Your Customers

Using CINNOX’s smart greeting capability, businesses can engage with customer proactively, instead of waiting for them to initiate conversations. Businesses have the flexibility to pre-configure welcome message to guide customers through their webpages and take charge of the conversations. This not only encourages customers to initiate conversation with your agents, but also enhances their overall experience on your website.

Let’s look at Mr. Jean Wick’s journey in availing a pre-approved personal loan from his bank.

As we can see from the example, the process of loan application and disbursement can be effortless and straightforward with the backing of the right CX solution.

For global financial institutions to keep the growth momentum at high levels, it is important to get the CX strategy right. Customer’s expectations from businesses have evolved in the post-pandemic world and it is imperative for financial institutions to match them with their offerings.

1. Round the clock Availability:

Businesses can route calls to the appropriate units within your organisation. Customers interacting with an IVR menu may use their keypad to choose their desired destination, which can be set-up to send them to the most qualified staff for further assistance. Making use of advanced routing capabilities offered by CINNOX, businesses can direct incoming customer enquiries based on available staff, customer’s language preference, and location. Businesses can also bind a customer to a particular staff to ensure consistency in servicing using Sticky Routing.

2. Cloud-based Decentralised Design:

Delivering high-quality customer experience requires a solid end-to-end customer journey mapping that can outline every customer touchpoint, across entire organisation. CINNOX’s cloud solution lets businesses manage tasks and automate workflows optimally to create and customise entire customer journey in one place, on the fly. The platform’s decentralised design ensures global institutions can securely store and connect all customer data in a unified database for easy administration and monitoring.

3. Effective Collaboration for Consistent CX

CINNOX’s Digital Commerce plan comes loaded with capabilities to optimise your business’s workflow management. Depending on the products and services offered by financial institutions, customers are going to reach out with enquiries directed at specific departments. Your staff can easily transfer enquiries internally without breaking the chain of communication. Customers’ journey through the sales funnel can also be quickened by conducting e-KYC over a recorded video call from your CINNOX chat widget on your website, as seen in the above example. By labelling customer enquiries, your staff, even if distributed across the globe can have complete visibility of historical data and engage with customers contextually to deliver best experience.

While fintech solutions enable businesses to streamline their business operations and reduce costs to drive digital commerce, the onus of reducing friction points cannot be brushed under the carpet, as retaining customers requires a holistic view across a multitude of diverse experiences.