Three Strategies to Enhance Retail Banking Customer Experiences

Almost 50% of banking customers considered changing banks last year, with 28% citing online access as the top reason.

Want your bank to stand out from your competitors? You’ll need to improve your customer experience.

Customer experience (CX) has become the top brand differentiator for financial institutions, overtaking price and product. Better customer experience leads to greater customer loyalty/retention and referrals, higher sales/revenue and more opportunities to cross-sell products and services to existing customers.

Forrester observed that customers are 2.4 times more likely to stay with a brand when it solves their problems quickly and 2.7 times more likely to spend more at a brand when it communicates clearly. Customers are more likely to stay with a bank that quickly sends fraud alert text message, verifies suspicious purchases, and replaces your credit card immediately—not weeks from now.

Despite the benefits of delivering exceptional CX, many financial companies are missing this opportunity to set themselves apart. Here are three key strategies to move the needle forward on customer experience.

1. Improve the Digital Experience to Attract and Retain Banking Customers

Customers demand exceptional experiences in real time, everywhere. They rely on your bank to provide up-to-the-moment information to help them make wise financial decisions. They want real-time, easy, and intuitive communications regarding their mortgage loan application, alerts about fraudulent charges on their credit card account, reminders so they don’t miss a payment, and even notifications about other financial service products they should be using. They depend on you to deliver the communications they need, when they need them, wherever they are. To do that, you need efficient, personalized digital solutions.

According to Citizens’ Banking Experience Survey, 90% of consumers and 86% of businesses use digital banking channels. They also expect live assistance or convenient self-service options for complex issues. The Citizens survey found that human interaction—delivered in person or virtually—is the preferred way to get financial advice and execute more complex transactions. But in order for your teams to provide white glove treatment for these challenging issues, call volumes must be reduced by providing self-service that actually solve customer problems and reduce unnecessary call volumes.

2. Adopt an Omnichannel Approach in Your Retail Banking Strategy

Customers want to be able to get information and connect with your bank through their preferred channels, such as web, email, voice, live chat, SMS and/or mobile app. They may gather information about loan products and rates via your website, discuss their options with a banker via phone, and then complete the transaction by phone, email, or in-person. Then they use a mobile app to check their loan application status or account balance and chat with support agents, if necessary.

Bank customers expect consistent, secure experiences when accessing their financial information and seeking support, whatever channel they’re using—even if they're using more than one channel at a time. To provide this easy omnichannel banking experience in your retail banking strategy, communication channels must work together. Maintaining the context of all customer interactions requires that all customer data be centrally integrated instead of stored in separate, siloed systems across communication channels and departments (e.g., billing, marketing, contact center).

3. Hyper-personalize Customer Communications and Engagement

Customers expect their banks to understand their specific situation and provide them with personalized offers when they need them. According to Forrester’s 2022 U.S. Banking Customer Experience Index, the second most important CX factor is “Offers the banking products/services that I need.” The number one CX factor is “Resolves problems/issues quickly.”

According to Deloitte, “customers want interactions with their bank to be as sophisticated, immediate, and personalized as their experiences with other industries. As a result, financial services customers are willing to share data as long as they receive offerings tailored to their needs. Yet, 94% of banks cannot deliver on this hyper-personalization potential.”

Hyper-personalization means using AI to analyze real-time customer data, allowing you to deliver tailored messages about products, services and prices that are context-specific, timely and relevant to customers’ individual needs. For example, you could identify recent high school graduates and offer them checking accounts or credit cards geared toward college students.

How do you deliver proactive, personalized, and predictive experiences for every customer, on each customer’s preferred channels—all in real time? Where do you start?

You start by identifying what customers really want from banking experiences across channels, including AI interactions.

We asked nearly 2,000 U.S. banking customers to find this out. Our High-Stakes Moments in Banking report reveals which moments (like fraud alerts, billing questions, and transaction updates) matter most to your customers, what they expect from your communications, and where they do (and don't) want AI involved.

Read the High-Stakes Moments in Banking report to see the data and pinpoint where your CX strategy can make the biggest impact.