Financial service enterprises, take note: the success of your fintech is measured by your CX

We’ve seen a lot of change in the financial services industry in the last five years. But the most significant change? Legacy financial companies like yours aren’t financial companies anymore. You’re a technology company with a financial product or service. 

That means you can’t rely on your brand name to drive business anymore. This shift requires you to upskill, namely in technology and customer experience (CX). You may be a legacy institution, but if your website is having performance issues, no amount of brand recognition is going to change that. The market is oversaturated, and your customer has plenty of alternatives in fintech to choose from if you can’t keep up with customer needs.

5 considerations when designing your fintech

It’s time to update your technology and your customer experience. Here are some considerations to make when creating — or recreating — digital financial services products.

1. You’re not a financial services company. You’re a tech company that offers financial products

In the past, most financial companies completely focused on servicing their customers as a, well, financial company. But in doing so, legacy enterprises didn’t invest in the architecture required to create fintech that would enhance their CX. Instead, their differentiator was low cost. For every financial services enterprise, it became a race to the bottom. 

Now, you can get the same ETF wherever you go, for relatively the same price. And if prices for the same products are the same everywhere, that leaves you with the question: what’s going to drive your customer experience and differentiate you in a crowded market? 

You must lead with customer-centric technology. Your fintech should include voice-of-customer (VOC) at every step of the journey. It should be an iterative experience that adapts to the customer as their needs and goals evolve.

2. Trust is unique to your value proposition

Customer trust is vital to any experience, but it’s particularly relevant in the context of fintech. The conundrum is that fintechs are tasked with being informal while still conveying a tone of trust and reliability. 

If you look at the most successful fintech startups, you’ll find their content is affable, often with a humorous tone. But their products are also intuitive and offer a wide-range of meaningful uses that provide value to their customers. Moreover, these fintechs are transparent about how customer data is being used, and what they do to safeguard customer information.

If you’re a legacy enterprise, take the hint. You can rely on your reputation in the industry to communicate trust and reliability while also lightening up the tone of your content and design features.

3. Customer experience is the total experience

Customer experience is not just customer service. It is not just a cool app or website. Customer experience is the totality of interactions a person has with your brand, from the first time they step into your brick and mortar to the moment they share your mobile app with their spouse. Your fintech must be:

• Cohesive
• Synced to a single voice of customer (SVOC)
• Effortless to engage with
• Value-driven

If you’re not sure where all the entry points are into your customer journey, create a customer journey roadmap. You may be surprised to learn not just where your customer data lives, but how many opportunities there are to streamline the experience.

4. Beware of competitive chasing

Hot take: adding new tech features just to keep up with your competitors isn’t wise. Let’s say your biggest competitor rolls out a voice user interface (VUI). Before you rush to add voice activation to your app, ask yourself: does it pose any value to your customer experience? Does your customer really want to check the balance of their retirement fund on their Alexa app, or do they just want better performance on your website?

If you are feeling the pressure of keeping up with your competitors’ offerings, the best course of action is to survey your customer base on the proposed feature. For instance, customer insight may show your users believe VUI could compromise their security. They don’t want to speak their passwords into a voice activated device. And guess what? That insight just saved you thousands of dollars in product development.

Competitive chasing is often at the behest of your c-suite or tech team. Sure, it’s important to include business objectives in product development, but it’s not the whole picture. How your customers feel about those business objectives (or new tech features) must also be a major consideration in product roadmapping.

5. Customer experience isn’t an item to tick off a to-do list

CX is an ever-changing, ever-evolving practice. One that most companies can’t pull off in-house without significant investment. 

The best way to ensure that your company is providing your customers with the best experience possible is to create a customer insight program. These programs provide opportunities to incorporate voice-of-customer at every step of the customer journey. 

An in-house CX team is likely to have skillset gaps

Prioritizing CX at your organization requires more time, skills, and resources than your c-suite probably anticipates. One of the skillsets required is the ability to build a customer insights program that turns insight into action. 

Let’s use the VUI example again. Say your in-house CX hire surveys customers to see if they’re averse to logging into their accounts via voice-activation. If the customer says yes, that’s not actionable. An experienced CX team will present multiple log-in options in a survey and learn which option the customer prefers.

And that’s only one skillset. You also need to be able to roadmap your product in such a way that it saves you time and money in your development cycle. You could spend untold hours honing these insight program skills, but you only have so much time (and budget spend). 

O3 has the industry experience to leverage the incisive, customer-driven insight to reshape your digital products and services. The result is intuitive, iterative products that convey approachability, reliability, and utility. To secure a loyal customer base, you need an objective perspective with years of fintech consulting experience.

Ready to create fintech that’s built just for your customer? Reach out to our team.