CX.

Those two letters have become something like the Holy Grail of financial services as of late.

If you’re having trouble placing this particular abbreviation, we don’t blame you – finserv is packed with them. Don’t worry, we’ve got you: CX=Customer Experience. CX is primarily interpreted as the digital elements your customers use to interact with you (e.g., your website, portal, app…). Sure, your client experience is comprised of some in-person elements, but that’s just not the primary way most financial customers interact with their providers anymore.

As the world goes more and more virtual, CX is comprising a larger and larger slice of the “customer satisfaction” pie chart. 

Don’t believe us? Just look at Citigroup, which just announced they’re hiring 4,000 people with the sole focus of upping their CX game.

As Jonathan Lofthouse of Citigroup put it: “We’re trying to digitalize as much of our client experience as possible, front and back, and modernize our technology. Those firms that can digitalize fastest are going to create competitive advantage.”

But what if you don’t have Citigroup money? What if you’re a super-regional bank that doesn’t even have 4,000 people at your entire company, let alone in the I.T. department? How are you supposed to compete?

Today, we’re going to discuss step one: How to create a comprehensive strategy for your CX that will allow you to compete with the big guys. 

Characteristics of a Solid CX Strategy for Financial Institutions

The best digital CX can be described with four key characteristics that are non-negotiables for today’s customers:

1. Unified

The core of service that any financial institution delivers to their customers can be boiled down to one thing: data. The better you can unify a client’s data, the more value you can deliver.

The problem is that a lot of banks have 15+ entry points, which means clients have to have 15+ usernames and passwords. Yes, customers of these banks have access to all of their information, but if they want to get a unified picture of all of their data, they have to log into all of the different systems and paint the picture themselves.

If data is siloed on the backend for your team, it’s just as bad (or worse) for your clients and customers. Of course, there are all kinds of reasons data can’t be unified – different sources, lack of integrations, etc – but the truth is that your clients don’t care. They just want to have the best view of their financial situation. 

In the post-pandemic world of 2022, it’s incredibly important that you own your own data and can unify everything (without any conversions). Once you have that under control, we move on to the second characteristic of a great CX…

2. Personalized

With unified data, you can start to create hyper-personalized experiences for a wide variety of clients from one system – something unheard of just a couple years ago. 

For example, you could deliver personalized experiences for high net worth investors in the trust side of the business, consumer banking clients, a business owner – and not just that, but also for your internal users. 

A lot of that personalized experience helps drive adoption, so making providing personal insights to your team makes it easy for them to access the data that they need to help transform their clients’ lives.

3. Convenient

With technology today, firms can take an omni-channel approach to truly meet their clients where they are, whether that’s a watch or wearable or an iPhone or smartphone, or tablet or browser people consumers want to access their information from anywhere at any time and really, from any device. 

Convenience is being able to access everything from whatever device you’re using. Convenience is not getting statements in the mail. Your users are on the go, so even if they do get your correspondence in the mail, chances are they’re not going to open or read it. 

4. Transparent

Transparency is of utmost importance to today’s clients, and we don’t mean the kind that Millennials and Gen Z seem to love so much.

If you can’t provide customers with a complete picture of their assets – from deposits to liabilities to investments to assets held away – they’ll find someone who will, leaving your firm vulnerable to losing clients to Right Capital or Mint or some other free app. 

If you’re only providing a picture of the assets you hold/manage for them, then you’re only giving them half of the picture. Having total access to the information that they need helps them make the decisions that they need and helps their trusted advisors properly advise them.

The Key to a Great CX Strategy Starts Here

So how will you make your CX great? Where are you missing one of these four factors: unification, personalization, convenience and transparency? How will you provide it for your employees and customers alike?

Want to talk about how you can provide a CX that fires on every cylinder? Click here to request a demo today.