Welcome to the Banking Insights Series - providing the latest and greatest in the world of banking. This blog is just one of many offering invaluable insights on everything you need to know about becoming a first-class player in this world of API enabled banking and how to deliver a seamless customer experience. Want access to the entire series? Sign up here.
Customer Experience in the age of Digital Banking
Digital technologies have changed the game when it comes to customer experience.
Gone are the days of businesses relying on a physical high street presence in order to interact with their customers, and banking is certainly no exception.
The widespread adoption of smartphones, tablets and other devices has made new customer interactions possible and allowed for more innovative ways of delivering financial services. The increasing digitisation of the customer experience has led to a convergence of physical and digital touchpoints in the personal banking journey and there is now a need for many banks to revisit their existing provision to ensure that it delivers an optimal and integrated user experience (UX), at every interaction.
How to deliver a UX that outcompetes the competition
According to recent research, the most ranked current strategic focus among traditional banks surveyed is improving the customer experience. This is unsurprising, given the competition they face from challenger banks and other technologically-enabled entrants into the financial services marketplace whose disruptive solutions have raised the bar when it comes to customer expectation.
After all, in the Instant Economy where real time, responsive experiences are paramount, you’re only as good as your UX – and put simply, you need to deliver one that’s either more sophisticated, more intuitive or more streamlined than the next.
Every case will be different and bring its own unique challenges, but here are our tips for how to create a world-class UX.
1. Keep it simple
Remember you’re supposed to be solving problems for your users, not creating them so keep it simple.
Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to master complex financial jargon, navigate an interface without clear points of interaction, or to spend time clicking through pointless reams of information.
And nor should they.
Be ruthless, even on things you hold near and dear. An app design that might look minimalist to the UX designer who’s spent six months staring at it may feel hopelessly overwhelming to the consumer.
It’s hard, but as you construct interfaces and journeys for your customers, you should look at them through the eyes of someone who’s never seen a fintech product before.
There’s a reason why people still talk about Steve Jobs almost a decade after his death: nobody was better at ruthlessly cutting away anything a product or service didn’t truly need to be of service to its users.
2. Be secure and say why
There’s no getting around it: even the most starry-eyed techno-optimist has to concede that the digitising of financial services has created opportunities for fraud, theft and other crimes. Your users will know this and will expect authentication steps and other necessary evils for security.
That’s why it’s a good idea to put any security requirements front and centre of your UX. You have an opportunity to make a virtue of necessity and use it to build trust with your customers.
Do you need personal data? Say why.
If there’s a need to interrupt their journey for a security stage, be clear and transparent about what you need and why you need it. That way, you can get around any potential discomfort prospective clients may have around providing you with their private personal data.
3. Harness the power of AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to change the world. In many fields, it already has.
You can either be a part of this change, or you can look back on a digital transformation that never really went anywhere because your competitors gained an advantage, thanks to AI.
Of course, AI is a very flexible term and you have various different opportunities to include it in your offer.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has made great leaps in recent years: but is it better deployed in a chatbot, or a voice interface? Which one of these best suits the service you want to offer – and, more importantly, the segment you want to serve?
Alternatively, what kind of AI-powered services can you offer? Digital financial advice has taken off recently but how could your clients benefit from it? Are they the kinds of customers who would want it? And how can you use their own data to enrich the service they receive?
4. Use design to build your journey
The ‘user journey’ is a phrase that can be overused to the point it becomes all but meaningless.
But what actually is a user journey?
From your side of the process, you’ll be thinking about complex flow charts and technical representations of what data to surface and when.
But from your customers’ perspectives, it’s simply how they pass from initially choosing your service to getting the service they want.
Naturally, you want to make this as easy and frictionless as possible.
Design is how you do this: common motifs, keeping visuals consistent, using colour to distinguish different areas of service, and having clear calls to action that are appropriately highlighted will all make it easier for your users.
Is animation appropriate? Can you surface data for them in quicker-to-grasp formats? Is there an idea you can convey visually rather than in technical language?
Remember, they won’t have seen a PowerPoint deck showing them where they are in the sales funnel.
They want to do the banking they need and quickly get back to doing something more fun – and they’ll be grateful if you take up as little of their time as possible.
5. Go mobile-first – if it’s right for your customers
In a mere matter of years, smartphones have overtaken high street branches and websites as consumers’ favoured way of interacting with their banks. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this trend. 48% of British adults used mobile banking in 2019, up from 41% in 2018 – and given recent events, it’s unlikely that in-real-life banking is going to soar.
This means that an app is all but obligatory for banks today. Companies like Revolut have upped the ante for the whole industry, with global giants scrambling to create services that match those of upstart firms.
However, one thing to remember is that if you go mobile-only, rather than mobile-first, it’s putting a huge amount of pressure onto your app.
Listen to what your customers are telling you in the data you can collect.
How do they want to interact with you? Logic and current trends would say an app – but are you sure?
Success often lies in counter-intuitive calls on what channels the public wants for a service – and if you’re entering a space where your app is not best-in-class, you may be allowing your ambition to get the better of you.