Do BFSI Brands Dare to Challenge Traditional Norms?

Do financial banks track quantitative customer data points and benchmark their activities for better insights? Today, words such as seamless, frictionless, connected, digital, proactive, and tailored formulate the demanded customer experience. 

It’s the brand’s responsibility to glean the voice of the modern customer through any means possible.

“And these expectations travel across industries – so highly regulated brands such as financial institutions are expected to deliver the same frictionless experience as retail,” says Donata Peksa, Head of Brand Experience at HSBC. Moreover, the modern non-banking financial players who cater to the modern customer push traditional brands to innovate constantly. 

Peska talks about how financial institutions need to re-imagine their CX stack and strategies to stay competitive. 

Excerpts from the interview:

What can we learn from modern players like neo-banks, embedded banks and Banking-as-a-service? How are they changing the game?

One of the roles of these disruptive brands is to challenge the status quo and reject traditional canons – changing the way of thinking and working to better reflect the world we live in. The boldness to challenge conventions, defy the norm and put new ideas has traditionally helped create some of these iconic brands and ignited a change that revolutionised the banking landscape.

Neobanks differentiate themselves by appealing to specific groups or communities, like freelancers or international travellers, or offering benefits and perks that traditional banks may need to have in their proposition. They tend to provide innovative services, which quickly become more common among traditional players, pushing them to innovate constantly.

For example, two-day early access to direct deposits, no-fee currency accounts, or free access to international ATM networks. Their selling points are usually no or very low fees, convenience and ease. That’s their way into consumers’ pockets. Once they get transactional and day-to-day banking, they position themselves as a more holistic service provider for business banking and wealth management.

How have CX expectations evolved for the modern-day customer?

There was a time when consumers expected brilliant basics such as quality service and fair pricing. Today, customers have much higher expectations, which tech titans and nimble fintech have set. They require seamless and frictionless journeys, connected experiences across digital channels, proactive and tailored journeys and services, personalised interactions, and fair value exchange. And these expectations travel across industries – so highly regulated brands such as financial institutions are expected to deliver the same frictionless experience as retail.

What advice would you give teams to build an ideal CX tech stack for financial companies?

Understand consumer needs and behaviour by tracking quantitative customer data points and benchmarking their activities. These include measures that tell you what is happening on your website, social and apps, such as engagement, sentiment, reposts, conversion, bounce rates, and repeat visits. Collecting data through customer surveys helps understand how satisfied the customer has been with their journeys or a specific interaction. NPS surveys allow us to understand ‘the why’ behind user behaviour. We capture customer insights or qualitative data, showing how we perform across all channels and touchpoints. We must then connect feedback data with customer data for a holistic view of the end-to-end brand experience. To close the loop, we need to leverage this actionable data to inform actions to improve customer experience. Additionally, customer journey mapping as a specialism is an excellent way of applying a magnifying glass to specific steps or pain points within the customer experience.

What are the new approaches to gathering valuable customer feedback that can feed into insights for the marketing team?

In the environment of survey fatigue, we need to be able to draw feedback from various conversations with customers and, more importantly, glean the voice of the customer from their preferred channel (whether it’s mobile apps, websites, email, SMS or chatbots). We need to weave customer feedback requests into existing front-line daily routines and the tools and processes they already use, so they can be connected to customers and know what they need to do to improve the experience. That means gleaning customer feedback during a live chat session, providing short customer feedback forms on websites and in apps, using email surveys for new customers as part of the servicing journey, monitoring social media channels, creating an online community of fast adopters, and rewarding frequent reviewers with access to prototype products or services, are all convenient ways of gathering voice of the customer.

For more insights on CX in the BFSI sector, join us at CX NXT – BFSI Summit, which will take place in London on 07 May 2024. For registration and more information, visit CX-NXT BFSI Summit.