Let’s go back to 1990s. There were hardly many fintech companies and minimal tech innovations. Customers had to stand in line and there was no internet, no timelines but still most banks used to get very high rating on CX ( it was customer satisfaction survey then). Why? Because the customer was told that they can expect this only from the conventional banks and what they are getting was the best. What banks did was that they set the customer expectations and clarified the same. With more sophisticated banks getting into the play as well as other new players jumping it, the major differentiator was enhancing the customer service proposition as the product and price differentiation was either same or negative for most of the players. They made customer realize the value and premium of servicing. The fintech companies of modern world are making customer understand the value of service and creating an ecosystem around the customer to enhance his satisfaction level.
We shall look at the fintech relevance of CX six pillars.
Personalization: With Social media, Deep tech and data integration, fintechs are best placed to offer the most personalized products and services. You get personalized offers based on your last transactions and credit scores. Your fintech will know when to send an offer with most likelihood of acceptance; how to bundle the products; which coupons to be given; what is your latent need and what environment will trigger which purchases. With the use of Hyper personalization and Cognitive banking, & voice tech, fintechs are touching all the right nerves for an enthralling customer experience. They are employing natural voice processors, multilingual bots and customized contents to individual customers using AI/ML. All these help lessen one of the major resisting point for customers – Expectation of human touch while handling finances.
Integrity: With lot of unregulated and boundary line policies for fintech across the globe especially on customer servicing and SLAs, the fintechs are easy to be lured into the unethical ways of working. While this doesn’t necessarily means breaking the laws of land, it leads to lot of customer dissatisfaction. Examples are omitting the specifics on pricing, T&C and exit rules for lending, frequent change in policy rules, use of unethical practices, AML guidelines, and of course going against the law of the land. Also due care should be given to ensure high level of data privacy, content usages approvals. Companies like Wells Fargo have paid in excess of $3B as fines for fraud and it led to lot of trust loss for the company.
Expectations: For Fintechs, it becomes ultra important to set, meet and they exceed the customer expectations. You Overpromise and under delivery on any product and even after the best servicing, the customers are going to perceive you as incompetent or satisfactory at best. The key is you under promise and over deliver.
Generally, customers have extremely high expectations and deliverables demands from fintech. It becomes all the more necessary for fintech firms to guide the customers for the reasonable and realistic numbers.
Resolution: No one is perfect and no one can be. Even after all the hard work there would be times when customer expectation is not matching with the service delivered or customer genuinely had a bad experience. The customer has taken the pain to come back to organization and give feedback. This is where the differentiation happens. Fintechs need to ensure that they convert any and every bad experience into one of delight. Not giving the resolution leads to an extremely caustic WOM which is highly detrimental to the company. Even in cases where a resolution is not possible or customer’s demands are unrealistic, the same should be appropriately explained to the customer.
Time & Effort: The customer has come to you or enticed by you to close a purchase. His purchase and post purchase journey should be super smooth as unlike traditional medium, the fintechs are completely dependent on tech for closing the sale. The UX need to be top notch with well designed and interactive pages, low latency and load time, ease of payments and methods, easy and clearly explained products and someone to take the customer through the process in case he needs help (Autobots, web apps). This one thing creates the highest level of difference for enhancing the customer satisfaction. The same theory applies to post purchase interactions also.
Empathy: Great customer experiences are build on this. You need to have a human angle to the service and show that you care. That is what it takes for the worst of the customer issues to get resolved. The customer has come to your site / app to solve one or few of his pain points. you need to understand the same and guide customer appropriately. Be proactive in understanding the customer issue and try to find a permanent solution to it. Make your people more social media savvy and give a human touch to it. And ensure you team develops that deep sense of connect with customer.
High level of positive DX in Fintech wi ll make your company a force to recon with and the key differentiator will be the service which is extremely difficult to copy. You have already beaten the competition.
