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B U I L D I N G A DY N A M I C CX P R O G R A M :

Financial ServicesCritical factors for banks, credit card companies,

and other financial organizations

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Outcomes Of a Dynamic Customer Experience Program

Building a Financial Services Customer Experience Program

Critical Factors For a Successful Customer Experience Program

About Qualtrics

pg. 3

pg. 4

pg. 8

pg. 13

pg. 15

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Introduction

In today’s world of constant communication, consumers have thousands of financial services providers at their fingertips with the click of a mouse. And when it comes to actually choosing a bank or insurance provider, these consumers have access to millions of online reviews, consumer forums, and social media comments to take into consideration. If financial service providers want to stay relevant in an opinion-saturated market, they must invest in the future of consumer acquisition and retention: customer experience.

According to research by Forrester and Watermark, companies who prioritize customer experience outperform those who don’t by nearly 80%. Customer experience is particularly important for the financial services market where optimizing the customer lifetime value is paramount for success. Exceptional customer experiences lead to increasingly loyal customers, more referrals, and lower churn. Simply put, your company’s commitment to customer experience can either mean your company’s success or the success of your competitors.

This ebook will a) discuss the outcomes customer experience programs generate b) provide an overview of what a customer experience program typically entails, and c) outline critical factors you should consider when beginning to build out your program.

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I M P R OV E D CX R E D U C E S AT T R I T I O N

One of the first and most visible reasons companies decide to prioritize customer experience is to reduce customer attrition, commonly called “churn.” In the financial services world, churn is of particular concern to companies with non-binding contracts, like credit card companies and banks. For these organizations, attrition rates high as 25-30% are not uncommon, and even companies with some type of annual contract may experience attrition rates around 5-7%.

The solution? Customer experience management. Many companies use Net Promoter Score (NPS®) as a quick way to gauge their overall customer satisfaction, and for good reason. A recent Temkin Report indicates that your company’s promoters are 81 percent more likely to repurchase your products or services, compared to passives and detractors, who have a 44% and 16% likelihood to repurchase, respectively. Your company’s policies or services may be the best in the financial services market, but if your customer experience is lacking, you may find yourself losing business to your customer-conscious competitors.

Your company’s

promoters are

81% more likely to

repurchase your

products.

Outcomes of Dynamic

CX Management

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After you’ve used NPS or another method to take stock of where your customer experience currently stands, begin identifying what drives satisfaction for your customers. When you know what makes them happy, you are better able to prioritize those areas and provide “wow” moments for your customers that will turn their satisfaction into long-term loyalty.

These “wow” moments don’t need to be over-the-top or hard to execute, it may be as simple as depositing $20 into your customers checking account or waiving a late fee for a valued customer. However you choose to thank your customers, make it genuine and personal.

Next, address sources of dissatisfaction. Is your website hard to navigate? Do customers have a difficult time finding your customer support phone number? Put your customer feedback program to work by asking your clients to tell you what causes them frustration and what they’d like to see your company do differently. The information you collect will help you optimize your product and service offerings to give customers more of what they want and will help you find and resolve potential problems before customers become frustrated. Anticipatory service is always better than reactionary service after a problem has occurred.

However you choose to thank your

customers, make it genuine and personal.

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Improved Customer Experience Increases Cross-sell

When you ask your customers for feedback, you’re inviting them to tell you what they value most. This information helps you not only improve your customers’ experiences with the services they use and love now, but also gives you the tools to make better recommendations for additional services they might need or enjoy.

After you’ve identified what products and services are most likely to trigger a cross-sell opportunity, train your in-branch and call center team members to better identify opportunities to introduce customers to additional products or services that might be useful to them. Customers are more likely to spend additional money with your company if they think you have their best interests in mind.

Collecting feedback on what customers value most will also help you to prioritize and improve the aspects of your business that have the greatest impact on customer retention and cross-sell opportunities. For example, if you customers tell you that they primarily access their bank accounts via your mobile app, you might decide to allocate more resources to developing and improving your app, rather than spending that money in other areas that may have less of an impact on your business goals.

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Improved Customer Experience Helps Differentiate Your Company

A recent study by Oracle found that 91% of surveyed organizations aspired to be among the customer experience leaders in their industry, yet only 37% had made formal efforts toward achieving that goal. In light of these numbers and an increasingly socially-informed consumer base, your company’s investment into customer experience will be what sets you apart from other financial services organizations in the coming years. And it’s an investment worth making— according to research by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, organizations who prioritize customer experience see returns on investment that go far beyond happy customers. Customer experience leaders reported a positive return on investment of +22.5% to shareholders, while customer experience laggards reported a negative return on investment of -46.3% for the same period of time.

In addition to making you the customer experience leader in the financial services market, prioritizing customer experience will give your company the tools it needs to work smarter and more efficiently. With an in-moment feedback tool that alerts the relevant parties the moment the feedback comes in, leaders in your branches and corporate offices can easily close the loop with the unhappy customer to resolve issues before they cause attrition, and act on feedback to improve the experience for the next customer. And because the customer experience in financial services is so often impersonal, your organization’s commitment to your customers will make you a standout in the industry and earn you customers for life.

CX leaders reported

a positive return

on investment of

+22.5%

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Building a financial

services CX program

ST E P 1 : I D E N T I F Y W H AT TO M E AS U R E

Hopefully by now you’re convinced that you should invest in a customer experience program, but where do you start? The process may seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Whether you’re building your CX program from scratch or your current efforts need an upgrade, your first step is to map your typical customer journey and identify which touchpoints are important for you to measure.

Start mapping by identifying your most common customer type. Your organization might have several different “customer personas,” but you’ll likely have one that is more common than the others. For large insurance companies, this might be a corporate buyer looking into insurance policies for her employees. For a small credit union, the most common customer type might simply be an individual looking to open a checking account.

Next, create a “timeline” for how your customers do business with your company. Begin your journey map with the first point of contact that you have with the customer – maybe the customer walks into your branch to ask about a small business loan or chats with a customer service representative on your website. Next, map the rest of the journey as you currently understand it. Don’t worry about making your map perfect the first time – this is an iterative process that you can refine over time.

Here’s an example of what a typical customer journey map outline might look like for a financial services organization:

Customer Journey

After you complete your journey map, the next step is to identify how to measure each touch point in the journey. This part is simple – spend time evaluating each touch point and evaluate what information you would like to collect about each. In the financial services market, the typical customer journey (and each step within the journey) may take place over several years, meaning you can––and should––be measuring your customer experience more than once at each touch point.

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ST E P 2 : I D E N T I F Y H OW TO M E AS U R E I T

There are two types of customer feedback channels: solicited and unsolicited. Solicited channels are used to proactively seek a customer’s feedback, like an emailed survey or a website intercept. Unsolicited channels are feedback collection methods outside the company’s control, like social media or consumer review sites. You can utilize a combination of solicited and unsolicited channels to measure each step in your customer’s journey.

Below are some examples of the types of feedback channels you can utilize:

In-branch feedback

Capturing feedback after in-branch visits allows you to understand how satisfied customers and potential customers were with the experience, what they were trying to accomplish, and how to improve the experience. Common ways to capture this feedback include post-visit surveys sent via SMS or email. A final option is to conduct targeted, in-person surveys

between customers and managers after a completed visit to allow for a more detailed conversation using an offline app.

Post-telephone conversation

Many interactions occur over the phone, and best-in-class institutions capture feedback after those engagements. Common ways to collect feedback include automated IVR surveys and SMS surveys.

Website & Mobile Experience

Customers are increasingly turning to mobile apps and websites to engage with their financial institution. One common way to capture feedback includes launching a targeted post-visit survey that invites the visitor to indicate their satisfaction and how to improve the experience. To allow for non-solicited feedback, simple page-level feedback questions or static feedback links are a discreet way for visitors to provide feedback when and if relevant, without disrupting the experience.

There are two

types of customer

feedback channels:

solicited and

unsolicited.

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Relationship Surveys

To truly understand your customers, it is important to do more than simply capture feedback after interactions. Relationship surveys allow you to understand a) what your customers think of your institution, b) where their needs are not being met, and c) where there could be opportunities to expand your business with them. Furthermore, these surveys allow you to track satisfaction over time to measure progress by customer type and geography. Common ways to capture this feedback include email and SMS.

While the channels mentioned above are a good starting point, you can learn more about feedback channels and how to pick the best channels for your organization in the Qualtrics Ultimate VoC Starter Kit.

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ST E P 3 : B E G I N M E AS U R I N G & I T E R AT I N G

Now that you have identified when and how you want to collect feedback, you can begin testing your feedback channels and adjusting your program as as you go. Unfortunately, many organizations overlook testing when they build a customer experience program. This is a critical part of the process, because testing ensures that your program actually measures what it is intended to. When gauging the quality of survey questions in your program, there are two key factors to check: reliability and validity.

Reliability

Ensure that all questions are well-designed and will collect reliable data (e.g. No duplicate questions).

Validity

How easy survey items are to understand and analyze.

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ST E P 4 : D R I V E I M PACT AC R O S S T H E O R GA N I Z AT I O N

Ultimately, your customer experience program should aim to deliver real-time customer insights in ways that are relevant to critical functions in your institution. The graphic to the left highlights the ways in which customer experience management can impact stakeholders across your company.

Each function or team will have a different set of metrics that matter to them. The retail banking organization will want to understand how customer satisfaction differs by teller, and what is driving those scores so they can coach and drive improvement. The private banking function will need real-time updates on satisfaction for top accounts with automated alerts for any top account with a satisfaction score score below a certain threshold. Branch managers will want insight into the points of friction within their branch, and how to improve the in-branch experience.

Best-in-class organizations adopt reporting dashboards that are both functional and role-specific, so that each relevant team member can understand what actions need to be taken in their realm of influence to improve customer outcomes. Ultimately, what makes a customer experience program successful is the degree to which it changes behavior in ways that improve customer and financial outcomes. Putting relevant, real-time metrics in the hands of your employees helps make that possible.

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Critical factors for a

successful CX program

TA R G E T I N G T H E R I G H T M I L E STO N E S

The best customer experience programs aren’t built in a day – organizations who build successful programs begin with foundational elements of customer experience, such as NPS, Relational CSAT, and ad-hoc satisfaction studies, and build as their company matures. The graphic below demonstrates how a typical customer satisfaction program could build over time:

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Choosing the Right Feedback Program for Your Organization

The quality of the data you collect very much depends on the tool you use to collect customer feedback. There are many feedback tools on the market that allow you to send surveys to your customers, but because customer outcomes are so integrated with employee behavior and market trends, your CX program’s success is dependent on you choosing a dynamic customer experience management platform that allows you to integrate data from across your organization.

A dynamic CXM platform will allow you to:

• Collect customer experience data in real-time across any channel

• Close the loop with customers

• Notify stakeholders immediately of low satisfaction scores

• Alert account executives of at-risk customers and what is driving dissatisfaction

• Make changes and enhances without requiring vendor approval

• Monitor customer data by branch, geography, and account type

• See long-term trends

• Tie all of your company’s data to business goals and financial outcomes

According to New Vice Media, American businesses lose up to $41 billion in revenue each year due to poor customer experience. Don’t leave money on the table. To learn more about how you can build or improve your organization’s customer experience program, visit https://www.qualtrics.com/financial-services/.

American

businesses lose

up to $41 billion

in revenue each

year due to

poor customer

experience.

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About Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a rapidly growing software-as-a-service company and the provider of the world’s leading insight platform. More than 7,000 enterprises worldwide, including half of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 business schools, rely on Qualtrics technology. Our solutions make it fast and easy to capture customer, employee, and market insights in one place. These insights help our clients make informed, data-driven business decisions. Global enterprises, academic institutions, and government agencies use Qualtrics to collect, analyze, and act on voice of the customer, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, 360-degree reviews, brand, market, product concept, and employee feedback. To learn more, please visit qualtrics.com.

Ready to learn how the Qualtrics Customer Cloud can help you improve your customer experience? Schedule your free demo today at qualtrics.com.