By Kristina Leach, Director of Global FSI Insights, Quantum Metric
In recent years, digital has become a key driver of business sales and revenue. This was accelerated significantly by the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving 55% of companies without a digital transformation process believing they have less than a year before they begin losing market share.
An always-on digital strategy that sees digitised processes and offerings continually improved and updated can help achieve true operational efficiency. Known as continuous product design (CPD), identifying, prioritising and fixing front-and-back-end snags around how things work across departments is one essential part of improving the efficiency of digital for an organisation. Improving digital efficiency reduces operational costs and the time it takes to resolve customer experience issues. This is imperative in ensuring a business remains competitive and runs as efficiently as possible. However, due to legacy technologies and strict rules and regulation, financial services have been slower than some other industries to fully take advantage of digital technology’s potential.
Research has found that the top customer frustration with banking apps is login and user authentication issues, with nearly a third of customers (30 percent) admitting to having problems getting into their app. Additional digital frustrations include poor online customer service and notification issues. According to Quantum Metric, the average consumer organisation leaves over £180M on the table per year due to inefficiencies such as these, with digital teams taking up to four weeks to resolve digital issues or optimise experiences. While many businesses acknowledge the importance of digital-first initiatives in helping to fix customer pain points, they may not know where or how to start implementing their own digital strategies.
Complexity
It can take a lot of work to accurately align and quantify digital priorities. Consumer finance has changed drastically over the past few years. Gone are the days of cheque books, deposit envelopes, and heading to your local branch on a regular basis. People’s preferences are rapidly evolving, and a digital-first mindset has become increasingly prevalent. Not only are people more inclined to manage their money online, but they are also engaging across multiple channels and expect a consistent experience across all of them.
This creates more data volume and richer data sets, which on one hand can help paint a better picture of consumer behaviour but can also make it harder to identify and resolve friction points. This can lead to a lack of agility, meaning customer needs aren’t being met. Recent Quantum Metric research has revealed that instead of requesting help, 19% of people give up entirely or move to a different bank when this happens – also known as digital leakage. Placing focus on improving digital-first, self-service options rather than relying on a customer service team can help make sure customers are kept happy while also reducing contact centre costs.
Visibility
The second obstacle is visibility. Financial institutions and service providers may find it difficult to gauge a holistic understanding of when, where, and why their customers are struggling. This is because the easy-to-spot issues may take up all the headspace of a customer service team, while important but less visible issues go unnoticed.
With the help of CPD technology, digital teams can identify barriers to optimal digital experiences faster and easily assess which ones are having the most negative impact. By being able to see all the issues easily and how they are affecting the organisation’s operations and processes, they can be prioritised, so the worst friction points are addressed first. In addition, they can get a clear view of what caused the issue and the best approach to resolving it, significantly improving the organisation’s ability to resolve issues quickly.
Knowledge
Ensuring that customer experience teams have the right digital analytics expertise is arguably one of the hardest challenges for any businesses. Expertise often lies with one or two specialist members of the team, however, when those employees are unavailable, the lack of understanding amongst the rest of the team is soon exposed.
When this happens, operational efficiencies can grind to a halt and digital needs go unanswered or unresolved. By having full digital visibility across the organisation and a clear priority for what needs to be fixed first, financial organisations can make digital accessible to all. With the heavy lifting done by CPD technology, every team member can be trained to access, interpret, and understand any customer data available to them. This speeds up the data cycle, replacing a tedious and repetitive job for time-poor businesses.
Given that companies with digital-first strategies are 64% more likely to achieve their business goals than competitors, it’s important that financial services take action. With a better understanding of customer pain points and frustrations, digital can be brought into regular operations. If executed correctly, digital-first programs will provide a much-improved customer experience and happier customers. This means there’s a greater chance of customers spreading positive recommendations to others, which can help attract new business.
Uma Rajagopal has been managing the posting of content for multiple platforms since 2021, including Global Banking & Finance Review, Asset Digest, Biz Dispatch, Blockchain Tribune, Business Express, Brands Journal, Companies Digest, Economy Standard, Entrepreneur Tribune, Finance Digest, Fintech Herald, Global Islamic Finance Magazine, International Releases, Online World News, Luxury Adviser, Palmbay Herald, Startup Observer, Technology Dispatch, Trading Herald, and Wealth Tribune. Her role ensures that content is published accurately and efficiently across these diverse publications.