Brand ambassadors are eager to spread the word about the virtues of your digital product — if they have a great experience. If they don’t, it can sink your brand’s reputation and your revenue.
To ensure you’re creating a pleasant, personalized customer experience (CX) that encourages usage and brand loyalty, you must meet your customer’s needs. And you can’t do that without their feedback.
Nascent B2C companies in particular have an opportunity to use customer feedback to establish trust, which is an essential component of successful fintech. Not only do customers want to be involved in shaping your digital product, but they’re more inclined to use your product when they feel heard. And if you don’t use their insight to inform your decisions, there are plenty of financial services companies that will.
Here’s how a lack of communication can compromise your CX, and what you stand to gain when you prioritize it.
Where do lapses in customer communication occur?
In our experience, even fintech companies eager to provide the best customer experience resist reaching out to customers to elicit feedback. That resistance often stems from a fear that customer insight could undermine expensive product development that’s well underway. Or that it will interfere with other stakeholders’ goals.
But it’s quite the opposite: the success of your fintech is intrinsically linked to customer satisfaction. In short, you won’t see gains in revenue if your CX is clunky or if pain points aren’t addressed. That’s because you won’t even have a customer base to speak of.
Communications breakdowns internally can compromise your CX, too
A lack of communication between business units — usually sales and product teams — can undermine a customer’s end-to-end experience as well. Sales teams may think they’re marketing to buyers with accurate information from their product teams. However, few organizations have channels of communication in place to ensure sales materials reflect the most up-to-date products and features.
Benefits of encouraging fintech customer feedback
Customer insight should inform every business decision you make, but here’s where it can enhance your processes the most.
1. Understanding your customers needs and expectations
Quantitative data can only show you so much about your CX. Yet fintech companies often lean on it more than qualitative customer feedback because it feels more efficient to make decisions based on patterns they see in the metrics. True, numbers don’t lie. But they don’t tell the whole story, either. For example, a banking app may have high adoption rates and high usage, but those KPIs don’t capture how users feel while using the app. They don’t communicate the frustrations users might experience with the user interface, or performance issues.
You can gain a deeper understanding of how customers experience your product through interviews — and not just with your fans. Take on your enemies, too. Hear out the negative feedback because often it’s even more instructive than the positive. Sampling different customer types and segments diversifies your feedback and captures a more holistic view of your CX.
Elicit unbiased feedback with third party interviewers
It’s important that you have a third party conduct your customer insight initiatives to encourage honest feedback. This way, customers will be less inhibited in sharing their thoughts, especially if they have pain points in the experience.
2. Informed strategic planning and marketing decisions
When you put the customers at the center of your problem-solving, you minimize assumptions — and risks. Before you invest time and dollars in a marketing campaign or product development, invest in customer insight.
Customer feedback can help you identify:
- Emerging trends
- Marketing opportunities
- Areas of competitive advantage
- Your most effective marketing channels
- Customer’s perception of your brand and products
- Messages that resonate with target audiences
- Optimal positioning
- New audiences
3. Securing a competitive advantage
A fintech company that incorporates customer insight as a core function of its business stands out in the marketplace. Essentially, it communicates to customers that they have a seat at the table in shaping their end-to-end experience. However, not all fintech companies have a dedicated team to address CX issues. Having such a team asserts a competitive advantage in an oversaturated fintech landscape.
How you communicate with your customers can set you apart from your competition as well. We’ll give you an example: AI tools like chatbots have become ubiquitous in fintech. At this point, you might assume that customers feel more at ease using them than not.
But what if you’re a mortgage lender? What if your fintech requires a complex application process that can feel stressful without proper guidance? In this case, a chatbot designed to “humanize” the experience might not be human enough. And it may fall short of answering all your customers’ nuanced questions and instead only generate more anxiety and frustration. Rather than a bot, you might try reaching your customer through (stay with us) the phone.
Optimizing your omnichannel communication strategy with customers means anticipating what methods work best for them. Full stop. Even if it means going old school and calling their landline at every stage of the customer journey, you have an obligation to meet them where they are.
4. Increased customer satisfaction
Feedback from customers provides you with insights into their experience with your fintech products, services, and touchpoints. It highlights areas where the customer experience can be improved, such as user interface enhancements, process optimizations, or customer service opportunities. Including them as you address these pain points will make your customers feel heard and considered. Even better, their overall satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty to your brand increases.
Partner with a financial digital product consulting firm to enhance your end-to-end experience
Prioritizing customer feedback throughout your product development drives customer satisfaction and establishes your fintech company as a customer-centric industry leader. With that in mind, you need to understand every touchpoint of the customer experience. From your brick and mortar building to your mobile and web apps, insight is waiting to be uncovered.
O3 has over 15 years of experience in financial services and has helped institutions and startups around the globe discover every gap and opportunity in their CX. We institute a dedicated CX team to ensure that feedback loops are seamlessly woven into your product development lifecycles, resulting in significant time and cost savings.
Before you even get to the prospecting stage of product development, we can pose essential inquiries to guide you. This includes asking if the envisioned product genuinely serves the needs of your customer base. Or how to personalize every touchpoint so it fits within the context of the whole journey.
Ready to prioritize the voice of your customer? We’re ready to help.