How finance leaders drive conversion through journeys

Despite significant investment, the financial sector still struggles to deliver consistently good experiences across the board. While some firms have made improvements in pockets, complete customer-centric transformation remains elusive. 

Financial institutions keen to challenge the status quo can start by re-examining their approach to capturing insights on their customer’s journeys.

The financial sector’s measurement gap

Experience has become a board-level topic. Consider the linear increase in mentions of “customer experience” in earnings calls. Indeed, as The Financial Brand identifies, improving customer experience continues to be a top corporate priority for all financial institutions.

Why, then, are the vast majority of financial brands still widely recognized for delivering terrible experiences? 

This might seem strange. After all, most have invested in elaborate frameworks for measuring experience:

• Many distribute post-interaction surveys — to measure touchpoint experiences and help optimize service quality.

• Many, too, take readings of the overall health of their customer relationships via semi-annual surveys.

• And virtually all distill their measurement efforts into a single, headline customer perception score — which should, ideally, function as a leading indicator of business results.

Frequently, however, improvements in service quality do not translate into improvements in overall relationship — or, indeed, business performance. It is a persistent conundrum in financial services, where institutions can highlight multiple quick-wins at touchpoint level, and yet their topline customer perception remains stagnant. 

The framework is missing a piece. And, for many financial institutions, that missing piece is journeys. Without measuring and optimizing journeys, financial institutions are unlikely to improve their overall relationships. 

This is because journeys are moments that matter — the moments that stick in the customer’s mind when responding to their provider’s semi-annual relationship surveys. Think about high-stress claims journeys in insurance, or protracted onboarding journeys in wholesale banking that take multiple months to complete.

More to the point, journeys are the moments that customers think about when determining whether or not to remain a customer. For this reason, journeys are more powerful for connecting experience investments with financial results — and 30 per cent more predictive of outcomes than measuring touchpoints alone.

In other words, there is a financial imperative for journeys to be part of financial institutions’ CX strategies. 

The challenge of measuring journeys in finance

And yet, few financial institutions successfully contextualize the touchpoint interactions they measure as part of a broader customer journey. 

There are multiple reasons for this. For a start, financial services journeys can be difficult to measure and optimize. In part, this is because they involve multiple departments. For example, a customer’s mortgage journey, from research to completion, might engage marketing, web content, in-branch advisory, lending, underwriting, settlement, mortgage services, and other functions. 

Some of those touchpoints might enable customer data capture, while others might not — a siloed approach leading to a partial view. Consequently, organizations may be driving improvements in touchpoints without impacting the overall experience.

More generally, challenges around data ownership can prevent cross functional action. Some financial institutions are starting to create journey owner roles, but typically journey owners lack the authority to drive coordinated improvements across the disparate touchpoints. This reduces an organization’s ability to make a difference.

Nevertheless, there are strategies that can help to bridge this gap. Here are a few ways that leaders in financial services are rethinking their approach to measurement and action-taking through journeys.

1. Re-evaluating journey feedback

To start with, organizations should consider when to solicit journey feedback.

First, it is important that the journey has actually finished. While a lender might consider a mortgage journey to be complete upon settlement, the customer might not think so until they receive the lender’s welcome pack. Obtaining feedback before value completion has taken place in the customer’s mind will provide an incomplete picture, at best.

Next, too many financial institutions go no further than end-of-journey feedback. The chief problem with this is that organizations end up listening exclusively to purchasers, while missing opportunities to re-engage customers who dropped out part-way through. 

Leaders in financial services are starting to reframe end-of-journey feedback as merely one of a number of tools in their journey measurement toolkit. 

Obtaining feedback at the end of a journey remains a solid first step, furnishing organizations with a look-back to understand the journey the way their customers actually experienced it — as a single, connected episode. It is this holistic view that will enable organizations to re-architect their journeys around customer expectations. But best-in-breed financial institutions go further, taking end-of-journey survey responses — particularly any open-ended text contained within them — and using them to identify high-friction moments elsewhere in the journey, where they may want to implement additional listening posts to probe a little deeper.

This is where journey-centric experience programs start to drive next-level impact.

2. Engaging at risk customers

Obtaining customer insight at intra-journey touchpoints provides opportunities to reconnect with customers, to address their concerns and keep them engaged in the process. 

If, during the application stage of a journey, a customer responds to a web intercept by providing challenging feedback about online ease of use, then it makes sense for the service recovery team to engage with the customer there and then. This necessitates that organizations be thoughtful about designing alert workflows and designating accountability for action-taking on data captured at intra-journey touchpoints.

Having granular intra-journey insights also enables companies to iron out wrinkles in journeys in a more targeted, accelerated way.

A great example is a full service bank in the Asia Pacific region, which captures customer signals across multiple touchpoints in the online journey, enabling the company to keep its website continually updated for optimal usability. In response to a high exit rate during the online credit card application journey, the bank was able to re-engineer the experience based on customer feedback, signposting the next steps more clearly. The redesign kept customers engaged and significantly increased conversion, reducing journey abandonment.

Of course, it is critical not to over-survey customers — “survey fatigue” will typically lead to reduced response rates. So, increasingly, leaders are choosing to divide up their opportunities for customer feedback — engaging a cohort of customers at journey-end, and a further sample intra-journey.

3. Learning from the silent majority

Even the most thoughtful journey surveys, however, will only get organizations so far. Customers today are less willing than ever to respond. And so, in order to capture the most meaningful insights, forward-thinking financial institutions must broaden their approach to journey measurement. 

Of course, surveys remain valuable within journeys. A well-designed program can furnish organizations with a range of scores to benchmark the experience by journey step and channel of interaction — together with some commentary from a proportion of respondents. But today, leaders are finding that harnessing additional text-based sources can empower them with rich theme, sentiment and emotional insights — and from 100 per cent of customers, too. 

The greatest value-add is the opportunity to learn about a customer’s journey experience wherever that customer happens to be talking about it.

A complaint about unexpected charges might contain information that would enable the product team to rethink the structure of the product itself, or the marketing team to clarify their external messaging about fees. Even within feedback programs, Experience leaders are finding ways to shed light on intra-journey friction points by leveraging text captured elsewhere in the journey. For example: a customer might say something in a post-application survey about how the organization set their expectations earlier in the journey — during the research stage, say — regarding the documentation needed to complete their application.

Technology solutions exist that can help organizations to capture all of this text-rich journey intelligence — from calls, emails, social and more. Financial institutions that fail to harness these data will miss opportunities to learn from the silent majority of customers who no longer respond to legacy feedback collection methodologies.

Focus on moments that matter

Frameworks for measuring experience are accretive — each element, when implemented effectively, should positively influence the next. For many financial institutions, there is an opportunity to shore up their measurement frameworks by rethinking customer journeys. Organizations that capitalize on this will be well positioned to drive their strategic measures of customer perception — and, of course, to benefit from the positive business impacts that come from this.