Focus on customer experience to stand out from your retail banking competitors

Conventional marketing wisdom dictates that acquisition is where you focus all your efforts. After all, you need new customers to sell to! However, when that’s…

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Magali Germain

August 23, 20215 minutes read

Conventional marketing wisdom dictates that acquisition is where you focus all your efforts. After all, you need new customers to sell to! However, when that’s what everyone else in your industry is doing, there’s a lot less room to stand out. That’s definitely true in the retail banking sector.

CX Index: What is it, and why should banks care?

Forrester ranks major players in the banking sector using its Customer Experience Index (CX Index). This assesses the experiences that banks offer customers based on effectiveness, ease of use and emotion (that is, the level of positive feelings evoked in users). According to the analysts’ research, “…brands that excel in CX increase revenue at twice the rate of brands that don’t.”

That’s a pretty compelling argument.

Breaking away from the pack: How to boost CX Index scores in retail banking

While it’s extremely common for banks to focus on their website and mobile app experience, Forrester finds that, “unfortunately, this is the driver category that has the least impact on the CX Index score.” Instead, it notes, “Drivers relating to how well the bank handled customers’ issues have the most impact.”

In short, quality websites and mobile apps have become table stakes in the banking sector. It’s the rest of the customer journey where you can score big points to separate your organization from your competitors.

Easier said than done: The three things standing in your way

Improving your customer experience to modern standards isn’t easy… which is another reason why it can be your opportunity to shine. There are three areas that present the biggest hurdles (and opportunities):

1. Consistency

The customer journey is really a relationship, and modern customers expect that relationship to be consistent from start to finish. If you’re great at welcoming them (acquisition), but their experiences in engagement through to retention don’t live up to that promise, their approval of you can drop quickly.

Because customers will be passing from team to team, solution to solution, throughout your organization over the course of the journey, providing consistency can be quite difficult.

The challenge: How do you create a consistent experience throughout each customer’s journey, from start to finish?

2. Omnichannel reach

Modern customers use so many different means of communicating these days, and they expect businesses to engage with them on the same channels. This is particularly the case in banking, where the customer base is so broad. Teenagers might prefer online chat, but older folks could feel uncomfortable handling finances outside a physical branch. Some people will take a live phone conversation over correspondence every time. Some customers are all for apps, web tools, electronic billing and bank statements. Others want to keep paper coming in the mail because they find it easier to file and keep track of physical records.

Your ability to appeal to these different user groups—and give them the experience they expect—hinges on your ability to meet them where they are. Unfortunately, that often requires wrangling a host of different communications solutions with different format requirements, vendors and—frequently—siloed internal teams.

The challenge: How do you offer, streamline, track, iterate and improve communications across all the disparate physical and digital channels that customers expect?

3. Personalization

Making customers feel like you understand them and their preferences is key to delivering a high-quality customer experience. It can also be a big help in identifying and capitalizing on upsell/cross-sell opportunities. We’re not talking about simply printing “Mr. Smith” at the top of a bill, though. We’re talking about next-level personalization in which your web properties, mailings and other communications shift to speak more directly to what the customer wants and needs.

As we all know, the less effort it takes for customers to make a purchase, the more likely they are to make it. People are also likely to evangelize a brand that “gets them”—and trusted word-of-mouth marketing is incredibly powerful.

The challenge: How do you effectively speak to your customers’ needs, wants, hopes, likes and dislikes at scale, without crashing or overwhelming your organization’s capabilities?

We’ve asked the questions… but where are the answers? How do you get past these challenges to grow and thrive? OpenText has you covered.

Finance CX Index leaders rely on OpenText solutions

A look at Forrester’s CX Index shows that seven of the nine best-ranked multichannel banks and five out of the six best-ranked direct banks use OpenText Experience Platform solutions to deal with those challenges (and others).

Our platform works with the tools you already have and use, replaces ones that you’ve decided are outdated, and adds powerful new capabilities to your existing marketing technology infrastructure. In other words, the Experience Platform evolves to fit your organization’s specific needs to achieve CX excellence.

Learn more

To learn more, watch “Rethink Experiences for Retail Banking.” This is a virtual, on-demand summit packed with expert insights to help you get started on your CX overhaul.

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Magali Germain

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