As the finance industry and its business executives stay up with technology and learn to harness its power, the customer experience (CX) will continue to soar in the next 20 years. Customers have higher expectations of the finance they deal with, especially regarding digital products. 2023 and the post-pandemic have increased the urgency of their demands and the necessity of digital transformation.
68% of consumers surveyed said they had increased their digital expectations of brands over the last couple of years. However, the banking and financial services industry (BFSI) fell short of such ideals. The financial services business failed to impress its clients in 2020 in several ways.
Why are CX platforms critical in the financial industry?
Because CX has become such a key distinction in banking, CX platforms have become increasingly significant in the financial sector. Higher recommendation rates, wallet share, and opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell products and services to existing clients are all outcomes of financial institutions’ investments in CX in banking.
CX Systems simplify your work by enabling brands to send customized messages to customers by predefined segments, such as location, activity, and more. This level of customization is a powerful tool for retaining customers and delivering a memorable service experience.
Top 5 Challenges CX Leaders Will Face & How to Solve Them:
Challenge 1: Hard to View Who Is Interacting with Your Brand
It’s only possible to know what’s working and what needs to be improved if a team can see how customers interact with their brand across all channels. Teams often make assumptions, use outdated data, or provide insight into a small part of the trip. Analytics geared toward the customer’s cross-channel journey offer a visual representation of the entire experience, drawing attention to any places of friction and demonstrating the effect they have on the company.
Teams can quickly and easily assess the progress of CX efforts through real-time performance dashboards and visualizations. These discoveries are used by real-time journey orchestration, which employs AI and machine learning to optimize and personalize each experience for each user.
Challenge 2: Difficult to Measure, Budget, or Track ROI
Every interaction with a consumer is a chance to solidify your relationship with them and find out what else they’re interested in. Personalizing these interactions and guiding them in the direction you want them to go when they have chosen to interact with your business makes perfect sense.
When a consumer logs in to their account, it’s an excellent opportunity to recommend, cross-sell, up-sell, or guide them to a helpful CX regarding knowledge articles or websites, etc. By interacting with customers in real time, you can improve their experience and save money by reducing the need for costly marketing and sales channels.
Challenge 3: Need a Bigger, Better Budget to Improve CX
Frequently, CX teams have to make do with meager allocations of money, time, and other assets. The most significant customer journey analytics and journey orchestration tools are flexible enough to grow with a company, making it possible for even small teams to have a substantial influence. To prove the worth of the investment to skeptical stakeholders, one idea is to launch with a single use case and gradually add in other journeys and events that fit with the organization’s present goals.
Challenge 4: Insufficient Interdepartmental Communication
Because of the multifaceted nature of customer service, CX teams must coordinate their efforts with those of other departments. This can be challenging, especially when groups have competing goals. Connecting current systems is a breeze for non-technical CX teams with the help of built-in connectors and API connections.
This lessens reliance on auxiliary services and prevents premature technological obsolescence. Furthermore, it guarantees that all channels and departments are coordinated and have the data they need to provide a best-in-class experience for the consumer from beginning to end by integrating them all.
Challenge 5: Employees React Negatively to Risk
CX Teams often need to work on things or become stuck when taking their efforts ahead. By providing data for the entire customer journey and the ability to orchestrate it, CX platforms let teams focus on what’s most important, move quickly, and make decisions they can feel good about. A productive workforce is essential to providing excellent service to customers. To provide superior customer service, many of today’s CX systems and solutions focus on energizing, connecting, and aligning teams.
With such stiff competition in the financial services industry, a solid CX strategy will help align employees to provide direction at record speeds and efficiency. Business executives need to seriously consider the challenges of employee engagement and management in a globally dispersed workforce when formulating a CX strategy. Customer relationship management (CRM) data, customer insights, and staff mobility are all essential components of a comprehensive CX solution.
CX Features Important in the Finance Industry:
BFSI is one of the least advanced in the widespread adoption of AI. Regarding the client experience, financial services organizations have also needed help with other types of innovation. Something is starting to change about this problem. According to a recent poll by the Digital Banking Report, two current top priorities for businesses have been enhancing digital transformation and providing better CX.
Therefore, financial services firms should jump at the chance to integrate customer experience and digital innovation into a single strategy by adopting a robust CX strategy. Consider some of the most common features of CX in the banking sector, which are listed below:
Feature 1: Boosting Productivity via Collaboration & Communication
In the financial services industry, customer experience solutions entail purchasing various products that increase team productivity. For instance, Gartner predicts that most businesses will adopt AI and chatbots within the next few years. Financial institutions investing in the correct CX solutions can use advanced digital customer self-service and assistance options.
Customers and clients can now help with a vital part of their lives—their money—around the clock, thanks to bots and self-service solutions. Your team’s in-app chatbots or website bots can use CRM tools and other data to enable individualized interactions.
Feature 2: Incorporating Customer Feedback
There has been a dramatic increase in the prevalence of digital experiences in the banking and financial services industries. Investors and portfolio managers alike are increasingly looking to mobile apps and other self-service technology to conduct business from any location.
Customers in the financial services industry want a fully digital and omnichannel customer assistance experience. When a financial services company adopts the appropriate CX solution, it can reach out to its clients no matter where they are and provide memorable interactions that boost loyalty and open doors to new business.
Feature 3: Enhancing Client Dedication
Competition among financial services providers is rising, and as more people learn they can get various services online, businesses are feeling the heat to provide exceptional service. You risk losing all of your community if you don’t know about the entire customer experience and use loyalty tools. Companies in the BFSI sector can benefit from CX solutions by gaining insight into their target market and implementing cutting-edge customer service technologies.
When businesses have access to the appropriate CX solutions, they can monitor the entire customer experience from the moment a customer first contacts the company until the finalization of the transaction. Customers want to communicate quickly, easily, and across multiple platforms with their favorite companies.
Each year, digital channels become increasingly important in the banking industry. Companies that use the best CX solutions to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience will remain competitive. You can give your consumers what they want in terms of adaptable experiences, and you can employ an end-to-end connection among the channels you offer for customer support to provide them with a unique and consistent set of interactions.
Feature 4: Increase Your NPS
Good word-of-mouth and a net promoter score (NPS) can help spread the word about your financial services company, enhancing your chances of bringing in new consumers. Customer service that exceeds expectations may be maintained across all channels when the appropriate technology maps the customer’s journey.
With the proper CRM/CX platforms, you can discover new service options like co-browsing and video chat to speed up customer resolution times. In addition, you’ll be able to provide your customers with better, more customized services. 80% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from a company if it can offer a unique and memorable customer experience.
Feature 5: Use Strong Safety Measures
Safety has always been a significant issue in the banking industry. Regardless of where a company is based, its customers care most about the security of their money and possessions. Companies can find the answers to provide great calm by employing the CX landscape’s analytics and cutting-edge tools. Set up end-to-end tracking in your CX and contact center infrastructure for flawless data transfer.
The most cutting-edge innovations in customer care and support, such as biometric voice scanning to lessen the likelihood of fraud, are all within reach with the right CX solutions. The more ground-breaking your security innovations are, the more attractive your company will be to customers.
Overview of Oracle & Salesforce CX Platforms:
The CX industry is so fragmented, and there is a strong need for mature and enterprise-level scalable platforms that can help the BFSI industry. Two significant platforms are BFSI capable – and they are Oracle and Salesforce.
Oracle
Oracle promotes its suite of sales and marketing tools, known as the Oracle CX Cloud, as a unified platform that can be used across multiple channels, including but not limited to social media, call centers, mobile devices, and physical stores. Improve your clients’ interactions with your business through several channels with its customer satisfaction and social relationship management tools.
Oracle’s CX Cloud Suite aids industry leaders in providing superior service to clients at every stage of their lives. Businesses rely on Oracle to differentiate themselves by increasing client retention, upselling, and advocacy across brick-and-mortar and online channels.
The technology facilitates the streamlining and maintaining client interactions beyond the scope of standard CRM functions. Oracle is a future-proof cloud platform designed for the next generation. It’s a comprehensive platform with different cloud services that let users create applications as needed. The system is robust in terms of security, scalability, and efficiency.
Salesforce
If you’re looking for a sales-focused CRM, Salesforce is a popular option. In 2021, it had an outstanding 23.8% market share in the CRM industry. Salesforce is a behemoth in the CRM space, but that isn’t the only reason to use it. Users can use the system whenever and wherever they choose, thanks to the SaaS deployment option.
Sales Cloud, one of Salesforce’s flagship offerings, provides a comprehensive overview of all client data and interactions. Lead and opportunity management, team collaboration, and dashboard and reporting modules are some of their significant functions. Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, etc., are just a few examples of the many Salesforce add-ons and integrations that simplify extending your company’s business software to other compatible platforms.
With no plans to slow down in 2023, Salesforce has dominated the IT industry for years. Therefore, there’s a greater need than ever before for Salesforce experts. But with so many options, knowing which Salesforce career to pursue can take time and effort.
Key CX Features:
Account & Contact management
With Sales Cloud, you see all there’s to know about clients, from their most important contacts to full activity logs and internal account discussions. It aggregates user-generated content from social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Reps can create account structures, organize meetings, send invitations to prospective clients, and keep tabs on customer profiles.
Reps can use the CX cloud to create accounts via the cloud, using web services or file import. They may easily access relevant contact data and related people from the homepage. The page gives you a birds-eye perspective of your leads, quotations, and contracts. In addition to a built-in map service, a tree-like account structure, and dynamic graphs, this module has it all.
Contract Management
Sales representatives can use built-in quoting features to create quotes with product information and customers pre-populated from open opportunities. Users can make new contract records and store them in the CRM database with the help of the contracts module.
By integrating with CPQ, CX platforms make it possible to generate quotes and contracts. It helps handle warranties related to sales, purchasing, and more. Arrangements can be copied and updated by sales reps.
Lead Management
Leads can be automatically distributed to the right salespeople with Sales Cloud. It uses AI to deliver high-end lead-scoring features. Depending on firm size, industry, demographics, and customer activities, lead scoring can be customized.
Sales Cloud helps sales teams gather information about potential customers through websites, social media, subscriptions, and marketing campaigns. Marketers can set up automatic lead scoring and ranking with this platform’s help.
Document Management
Users of CX platforms can utilize a few key phrases to find the data they need quickly. Documents and files can be made, uploaded, and managed. All uploaded files, current and previous versions, can be viewed in a version history list. PowerPoint and Word documents can also be converted to web-based versions for online viewing.
If you need to convert documents, Sales Cloud is a top choice. These CX platforms have excellent local and worldwide search tools. Cloud Service integration grants users everywhere role-based access to content regardless of physical location.
SoftClouds in the Finance Industry
As mentioned, two of the most widely utilized CRM platforms are Oracle and Salesforce for BFSI. Salesforce has been broadening its corporate and investment banking financial services. Integrating high-value offerings and a fiercely devoted customer base, CX for Financial offerings enable businesses to outperform all expectations.
CX Cloud is the central customer relationship management tool that can streamline transforming leads into prospects and reflects this data in reports, dashboards, and summaries.
My Conclusion
Customers of today’s banks anticipate effortless interactions both online and in-person. BFSI companies must maintain the frequency and quality of customer interactions due to legacy systems and aging infrastructure. Banks may get scalability and low overhead costs from the cloud to provide customers with exceptional service. By taking a best-of-breed approach to design, financial institutions can quickly adapt to emerging technologies and satisfy clients’ demands for a digital-first banking experience.
The world of finance is constantly changing. The financial landscape is shifting even more due to technological developments, a shift towards sustainable goals, and a boom in investment in innovation. Companies are actively exploring novel funding options.
As private companies recover and investors seek new opportunities, the private sector has become a popular destination for capital. Cross-departmental management, a balanced set of skills, and a solid data foundation are the keys to a successful financial future. That’s what sets apart the successful businesses of the future.
In the future of CX in the financial industry, more businesses will likely invest in products made to make teams and professionals safer. One possibility is spending more on virtual private networks, artificial intelligence systems, and data security. Recently, customers have swiftly migrated towards digital services for banking and financial support, heightening the importance of customer experience in the financial sector.