By Dicken Doe from Foolproof, a Zensar company

Covid-19 has changed the financial lives of millions; what worked for people and their bank six months ago might not work today. For some people savings have depleted and pensions withdrawn early. While mortgage holidays have increased the time required to pay back loans and emergency funds in the advent of job losses.

When combined with the fact that Covid-19 has rapidly sped up online migration, providers need to deeply question the design of their financial experiences. According to a recent survey from Lightico: “63% of US citizens said they were more inclined to try a new digital app for banking than they were before the pandemic. Also, 82% said they were concerned about paying a visit to their local banks.”

To be successful, both existing and new experiences must be assessed by using data and human insight to iteratively design and test solutions.

The swift response of many financial institutions to the crisis has created a number of changes to services and customer support functions. Things which have taken months of negotiation in the past have been made possible in days. However, speed does not always equal quality. Key considerations that need to be accounted for – to keep existing and newly acquired customers returning – remain. This can broadly be described under the auspice of consistent experiences that meet emerging customer needs.

Top tips to keep newly acquired financial services customers returning

Getting ahead starts with the ‘why’ customers are performing an action and ‘what’ they need. With this in mind, here are my top five tips for the financial sector on how to keep new customers coming back again and again.

Understand new and emerging needs:

People have been forced online in all-new circumstances. To respond appropriately, providers need to look at quantitative data and have a regular qualitative dialogue with new and existing online customers. This will help them spot emerging needs and behaviours which form themes and patterns in online browsing. To enable this, financial service providers must move from being reactive to proactive. This will help them to keep pace with the changes people themselves are experiencing in their own lives.

Financial businesses should look to segment, analyse and speak to customers who have started managing their finances with them since the beginning of the year and interrogate their behaviours. This will provide invaluable insight into what people are looking for and why.

Banks have an advantage here – when compared to other sectors – because saving, lending and current account journeys tend to start in apps or sites. By connecting site browsing with new customer account data, we can see individual demands expressed in the use of content, and the sorts of journeys customers are undertaking. Are these people struggling to complete a particular task i.e. setting up a direct debit? Is there something they’re entirely overlooking e.g. ISAs or loans?

At both the individual level and at an aggregate level, we can see emerging needs and trends. For example, the mortgage market has tightened up. Prior to Covid-19 there were 700+ 10% deposit home loans available, now there are less than 70. As a result, a decline in interest and a lack of ability for younger people to buy homes could signal a move towards people putting savings into ISAs. Likewise, too many customers are shifting to expensive and unsustainable debt, meaning providers need to imagine better ways to help combat this. This means designing value-adding solutions which helps maintain trust with the customer as well as encouraging them to come back.

Optimise journey flows:

The amount of tooling now available to understand journeys, identify breaks and ultimately address these issues is huge. There is no excuse not to be working hard on this, too many companies see a journey as set and overlook moments where design can be used to enhance processes. For example, why does opening online banking take five clicks and not one, and why is it so hard to find information about my pension?

Financial service providers of today cannot rely on a paradigmatic shift to new journeys with mounting financial pressures – their current ones need to evolve. If they aren’t continuously enhancing what they have today, it’s easier than ever for people to go elsewhere. Especially when 36% of people in the UK now feel more comfortable managing money online and 23% trust online money management more.

However, enhancements to services must be based on both customer needs gathered from qualitative insight and quantitative data from analytics and tracking tools to expose key problems. What you find out might mean redesigning specific moments in a journey, but it could also be done by improving signposting and information architecture, remarketing better, or tweaking content i.e. improving the findability of information connected to mortgage holidays.

Reasons to return:

Understanding people’s needs and targeting them drives better outcomes for all. Now is not the time for generic market offers because people’s immediate financial needs are significantly limited by Covid-19. The key to encouraging people to return is having a range of solutions that meet the specific needs of today. The credit card you had planned might not be what people need right now, but a compelling savings product could be. User research and insight will help you form validated hypotheses about offerings to test, and it’s precisely the kind of thing quantitative data alone will struggle to tell you.

Financial service providers also have the power to engage or reengage customers. They have ecosystems that join up channels to improve the likelihood of someone coming back. For example, if a customer opened an ISA in the past but stopped making deposits, perhaps it’s because they’re unaware of the annual limit on that sort of tax-free investment. If buy-to-let rates were reduced, perhaps they can afford that loan application abandoned last month. Financial providers need to harness the power of design to remind customers of the benefits available today.

As always, knowledge about customers and their needs has to be exposed, and new solutions devised to offer people ways back into your funnel. To do this you need a mix of research and data science to expose the problems for designers to work on.

Ease of use:

Across the financial services sector, digital design maturity is improving, but many processes are still unnecessarily cumbersome. Companies that have introduced rushed processes to support customers at a distance are likely to have solved an immediate problem, but to the detriment of the overall experience. Here, design thinking and service design can guide organisations toward optimising journeys to promote ease of use and coherent customer experiences.

Even months after the start of the pandemic, many organisations are struggling to maintain their inbound call centres and chat functions. On the whole, Help & Support pages offer just as poor an experience. These functions are often incomplete and overlooked, but are now the crux of banking experiences everywhere.

Banks must home in on these moments and provide other experiences in keeping with the standards set by the likes of First Direct’s award-winning telephone banking service. Within seconds, you’re through to an operator trained to handle loan applications, mortgage queries and more. The trick is to follow the right formula. You’ll want to avoid customers having to retain lots of information at once, navigating complex menu systems and always provide the option to speak with an operator. Services which adhere to this closely often outperform their digital counterparts – helping to relieve the strain placed on your overall experience.

Done well, conversational AI can make a big difference to customer experience and the likelihood of conversion too. Santander’s banking line harnesses this technology, and with a few vocal cues, you’re managing cash verbally. To succeed though, you must set up analytics, perform research and regularly optimise services to relieve friction and meet your customers’ ever-changing needs.

Summing up

Providers are increasingly talking about optimisation but finding immediate opportunities to squeeze funnels and processes for more value cannot come at the expense of great customer experience. Now is the time for immediate changes but you need to make sure those changes are sustainable and consistent with everything else you have that supports your online ecosystem.

In essence, delivering efficiencies can’t overcome delivering a poorer customer experience long-term. Where this is true there is a customer-centred design job to be done in the better understanding of customers and behaviours, and therefore research and design more focussed on those needs.

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