Four CX Trends for Financial Services Firms

As we kick off 2023, financial services organizations face an entirely new set of customer experience (CX) challenges.

Many are grappling with a hybrid return to work, an uncertain economy, and an increasingly challenging regulatory compliance landscape.

What’s more, if customers don’t get the experience they want with your financial services firm, they’re savvy enough to find a better alternative.

In a whitepaper, we dive into some of the most important CX trends and strategies for organizations to implement when it comes to their customer and employee experience (EX).

The good news? There’s never been a greater abundance of customer feedback, if organizations have the right tools to effectively listen.

Trend 1: Rising Customer Vulnerability

With the combined forces of the COVID-19 pandemic and consequences of rising interest rates, customer vulnerability continues to increase.

Financial services organizations, in particular, must pay attention to this trend. Government regulators, including the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, have placed increased scrutiny on firms who are not meeting the needs of this population.

Vulnerability can represent a wide variety of challenges — including financial or health concerns, or even a lack of digital accessibility to certain products and services.

Fair and equitable treatment of vulnerable customers is the top CX challenge for financial services organizations, according to the CX Landscape Report.

Many organizations struggle with this because they rely on manual monitoring techniques, such as customer support agents’ disposition codes, to track vulnerability.

Many vulnerable customers are not forthright about their circumstances, and may mask them behind language that isn’t obvious to every customer support representative.

Trend 2: Global Compliance Regulations Get More Complex

The global regulatory landscape for financial services organizations is complex, with a higher level of scrutiny than ever on these firms’ business practices. In the U.S., state-by-state regulations vary, making it harder for organizations to apply a consistent compliance strategy across the board.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Republic of Ireland and South Africa, consumer protections continue to increase, along with the pressures on financial firms to respond in lockstep with these changes.

Beyond vulnerability, managing customer complaints and agent process adherence are also critical concerns for financial institutions — particularly those in debt collections settings.

However, the same report cited above shows that a shocking 94% of financial services firms still do manual analysis of customer data to some extent.

That leaves a huge margin for error when it comes to compliance — putting organizations at risk of potential fines and reputational damage.

Trend 3: Firms Recognize the Importance of EX to CX

EX has had its moment in the sun, especially in light of trends like hybrid work and ongoing economic challenges.

Organizations realize that retaining great workers is critical to maintaining momentum and reducing the cost of recruiting new talent.

Particularly in high-turnover sectors like customer support, managers and supervisors are doubling down on EX. In fact, 99% of the organizations CallMiner surveyed believe CX and EX are linked.

Fortunately, many of the same AI-powered technologies organizations use to improve productivity can be used to actively listen to employees’ concerns 24/7.

By leveraging unsolicited employee feedback, HR leaders can make marked improvements to EX initiatives that help employees feel valued and recognized for their contributions.

Trend 4: Data is Widely Available, but Isn’t Driving Decision-Making

The last few years of rapid digital transformation have led to an explosion of customer data ready for analysis. However, possessing this data isn’t enough to make effective decisions.

Despite the wealth of data, 64% of financial services organizations agree that they are unable to make data-driven decisions about CX. A staggering 70% deal with incomplete sources of data.

Traditional metrics like net promoter scores (NPS) or customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores only take into account solicited customer feedback.

While solicited feedback is valuable, it often only measures positive or negative customer interactions — missing out on an entire middle ground of feedback.

This dynamic does not capture the nuance that happens in an actual customer conversation; instead boiling interactions down to numerical scores or positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.

Taking Action on These Trends to Drive Business Improvement

Our new financial services report dives into real-world strategies and tactics organizations can take to fully understand customer feedback via conversation intelligence, and apply it to transforming their business.

This feedback can impact business operations beyond customer support alone, expanding to areas like product development, sales, marketing and more. To learn more about how to effectively take action on these critical trends for years to come, download the report today.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of CallMiner – View the Original Article

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.