Unlocking Customer Experience Excellence in Financial Services: Actionable Steps for CX Leaders

“The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” 
- Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management, 1954

Customer centricity has long been a cornerstone of successful business. The notion goes something like this: by organizing your people, resources, information, technology, and products around customers’ needs, you win the trust and long-term relationships that drive customer lifetime value for the products and services your company offers. Customers are happy, business value goes up, and everybody wins.

While many companies generally accept the merits of customer centricity, most financial services organizations struggle to maintain pace with the change of technology, regulations, and marketplace threats—let alone the ever-evolving perceptions, expectations, and behaviors of consumers. Customer Experience (CX) excellence for financial organizations is no longer a differentiator. It’s table stakes. And it requires a village to get it right—or at least get aspects of it right—in 2024 and beyond.

The following perspective identifies a few key ways to pragmatically address the needs of today’s financial services customers. Notably, they address the reality that most financial services CX teams can only impact parts and pieces of the entire customer journey. While not boiling the ocean on all things CX, we believe these practical actions are more valuable because they contain realistic measures and approaches that leaders can tackle at a smaller scale—and succeed.

CX challenges in today’s financial services organizations

Customer experience in financial Institutions is arguably on the decline.

In an industry where trust is currency, financial services are facing a CX crisis. Forrester’s latest US Banking Customer Experience Index Rankings, 2024 Report indicates that customer experience measures as a function of how well a bank brand strengthens customer loyalty have declined for three consecutive years. Other research suggests that this type of decline could be attributed to a decline in the quality of experience for customers, which ultimately leads to a loss in satisfaction, product use, and revenue due to customer churn. One recent anecdote from a presentation given by Nicole Nevulis and Koren Stucki suggests that this decline might be due to many manual processes in the servicing of account holders, leading to broken customer and back office journeys, as well as uncoordinated feedback channels and data that remain unleveraged. While the Forrester data is a sampling of U.S. banks only, it suggests a larger opportunity: financial services firms need to take a closer look at their CX efforts. Now is the time for CX leaders to embrace actionable, realistic steps to address the daily challenges faced by customers.

Financial firms are not designed to support the full customer journey.

At CXFS 2024 in Boston, experts across the industry convened to share trends, insights, and ideas on how to take actionable, meaningful steps forward in service of CX enablement. At the conference, the Bounteous x Accolite team discovered clues as to where financial services organizations could focus efforts and make the most impact.

In his presentation “How the Rocky Mountains Shaped an Analytics Program,” CX4ROCKS, LLC Founder and CXO Sean Albertson explained that regardless of whether financial services firms believe they should be radically customer-centric, the truth is most are not. Financial services firms by nature tend to be product, department, and P&L-centric, despite espousing customer centricity at conferences and in executive board meetings.

Competing priorities, metrics, incentives, and accountabilities abound. For example, what might be important for a bank fraud mitigation team that mitigates loss by the unannounced wholesale lockdown of a customer’s checking accounts, might conflict with the same bank’s customer experience team that tries to maintain service and account access while the fraud is being investigated. Aligning all competing interests across the organization on behalf of a singular customer journey sometimes seems to be a fool's errand.

Proving ROI in CX programs is difficult.

“80% of financial services organizations say they want to prove ROI through CX, but only 50% actually can. And often, 90% of those that can’t don't know where to get started.” 
–Sashin Chincholi, Danielle Pike, CSG: “Navigating the new CX Landscape: Experience-Led Growth”, CXFS 2024. See also, 2024 State of the Customer Experience Report (csgi.com)

Most of the time, businesses focus on top-line measures of customer growth and market share, or efficiency measures that include cost to serve and operational improvement. A 2022 Forrester webinar titled “Follow the Money–Why B2B CX Success Depends on Outcome Metrics” states that CX goals and measures rarely get top billing. Instead, CX is often an ingredient to those measures and needs to be linked to work that drives those outcomes. This can make it challenging for CX teams to obtain funding for customer-facing initiatives, especially now, when timelines for proving CX ROI are shorter than ever.

Customer centricity requires a significant lift for the organizations that holistically endorse the idea.

For organizations that embrace some definition of customer centricity, remaining customer-centric often takes a significant lift in time, money, and resources at the enterprise level. Thus, teams must focus on actionable steps that can demonstrate productive, if not positive, results, and at least a return on effort–if not investment–forward. This is often not possible enterprise-wide and is usually more achievable at the departmental and product levels of the organization.

Actionable Insights from the Experts

While the inability to support and measure holistic, enterprise-wide CX impact may seem daunting, it’s possible. Realistic approaches to pragmatics focus on a few key ideas.

Be unremarkable.

“You want your experiences to be barely thought about. The customers’ minds are somewhere else, [especially in performing tasks that involve money or finances]. This is not a world to wow.”
–Panel discussion, “Implementing Digital Initiatives to Meet the Evolving Expectations of Customers,” CXFS 2024

During their CXFS presentation “Navigating the new CX Landscape: Experience-Led Growth,” presenters Sashin Chincholi and Danielle Pike shared their perspective that counter to the expectations of many branded digital experiences, financial services products and services should be so easy they are forgettable. Introducing too much in the flow of a customer task invites unnecessary friction and even risk during the lifecycle of a customer and their goals and tasks. Keeping it simple, unencumbered, intuitive, and unremarkable is a good reason to focus and tailor the efforts of CX Teams.

Think smaller.

In their CXFS presentation, Nevulis and Stucki shared that 73% of banking customers who contact their respective contact centers try digital options first. Many banks currently fall short of meeting the needs of those customers at those particular digital moments. Research also suggests that channel satisfaction decreases as channels grow.

Contrasting with the notion that organizations must meet the customer where they’re at, at every point in every way, CX teams should focus on resolving the primary channel first, and get the order of operations right for customers, before ambitiously tackling multiple issues across multiple channels. For example, in their presentation “Driving Toward Connected CX,” Ted Lijerstand and Gavin Cooper shared that leaders at Vanguard cite that the most successful journey-based efforts for improvement are customer experiences that are empirically measurable and have discrete beginnings and endings. In addition, careful analysis may reveal some channels and touchpoints are not worth the effort. Attempting to do something at every touch point across the entire decision journey is a recipe for failed organizational focus and customer disappointment. Start by identifying one critical touchpoint where a CX team can make an immediate impact.

Prove value in increments.

CX teams generally have a limited scope of influence across customer value chains, and, by necessity, they should maintain focus on much smaller outcome-measured use cases to demonstrate impact in the shorter term. Instead of trying to move the needle on macro measures like lifetime value or customer satisfaction, CX product teams should focus on improving priority moments that matter, like the interactions around closing on a home purchase or paying off a credit card. A hyper-focus on smaller journeys and interactions first is the quicker path to demonstrative impact.

As stated above, departments and teams that focus on CX but don’t have a seat at the C-suite table still need to prove their CX investments, often in shorter budget cycles. This often requires a crawl-walk-run approach to demonstrating impact and needs to expand beyond the voice of customer metrics. Teams make more impact by starting small, focusing on tight use cases, and “micro journeys” focused on specific customer goals (e.g., opening an account, or handling a fraud claim) that are more easily tied to specific top-line business metrics and have a finish line within sight. Always ask: “How is this more important than everything else?” when it comes to proving value and asking for continued funding.

Be willing to be wrong (and pivot).

Often, there's a rush to jump straight to solutions, bypassing the critical step of problem identification. This resistance stems from a reluctance to acknowledge potential missteps. In other words, people don’t want to know they might be wrong. It's essential to recognize when CX teams lack complete understanding. Product ownership can sometimes obscure visibility into actual usage, while customer experience insights bring teams closer to the end user's interactions and behaviors. For example, uncovering research that inadvertently leads to identifying touchpoints that drive up costs while searching for ways to delight customers in a service process is important to acknowledge. Give people and teams the opportunity and permission to pivot to meet the challenge of change.

A Practical Path Toward CX Excellence

“If you don’t align to purpose, you might start chasing shiny objects.”
– Doug Roerden, “Approaching Innovation with an Investment Lens,” CXFS 2024, Paraphrased from Simon Sinek, The Infinity Game, 2019.]

While wholescale change can be an overwhelming and costly effort, today’s adaptation within financial organizations comes down to the individual cultures and behaviors of teams, people, and relationships within the organization. It’s more about people and motivations than technology or data. A shared mindset for focus, priorities, and values that align with the core needs of customers is often more difficult to achieve at scale, but within a team or department, the concepts can be broken down into meaningful steps.

Determine what CX “Excellence” is (and is not), and what it means for your organization.

A recent survey of mid-level managers at financial institutions showed that only 28% of them could cite three of their organization’s strategic priorities, which suggests focus and clarity might be in order.

It’s important to take a moment to determine the direction of the firm. Is customer centricity for your organization centered on financial accessibility for unbanked segments? Realizing life goals for key customers? Maintaining financial fitness? What is the altitude of your CX mission? According to Lijerstand and Cooper, successful elements of agile journey-based efforts include anchoring to purpose, adhering to specific and limited CX principles, and empowering diverse talent. Being judicious in your efforts, accountabilities and definitions provides CX Teams a clear runway for focus and tangible measures. Carve away ambiguous language and conversations. Work hard at identifying the gaps, the challenges, and the mission.

The Road Ahead

The future of the financial industry maintains an overall belief that CX focus and effort can play a role in overall sustainability, survival, and growth. Not all organizations are created equal, nor do they share the same values and priorities, which can make the case for CX focus and investment a case-by-case exercise. But institutions that do value CX excellence must take action, measure, realize, and attribute their efforts to it or run the risk of being deprioritized and made irrelevant. Breaking it down into actionable ways helps most organizations tackle the seemingly monolithic challenge that most financial institutions face.

Now is the time to reevaluate your CX approach for your financial services organization.. What might be your first step?