Where have I been the past two months? Solving for Customer Experience in Financial Services

With my lastest consulting assignment, I was quite surprised at how time consuming it would be and how much venom people have for financial services right now. I thought it would be bad, but not this bad.

After 7 weeks of analysis, and quite a few more to go, here are some tips for those of you working in financial services and fighting the good fight of customer experience on a day-to-day basis.

1) Assume positive intent on behalf of the customer, reward demonstrated positive execution.

When a customer calls, he is calling for one of three reasons: (1) She wants to get something done, (2) he wants to get something fixed, or (3) they want to improve their quality of life.

This hold across, all industries and especially within financial services. Let me give some examples here. If you are in the credit card industry, what is worth more to you, that $15 pay by phone fee and that $39 late charge because they were a day late, OR that $15,000 in annual purchase volume and no negative publicity from that customer? This is a choice your associates are making every day.

2) Change sticks into carrots

I recently chose to book a flight using Air Canada for several reasons, neither good or bad. I had flown Air Canada before and it was a good to great experience. It was interesting to me that Air Canada didn't charge me for luggage, but instead, they gave me a discount for not bringing luggage. Clever and sends a totally different message to the customer and incents the right behavior.

Fast forward this to the Financial Services world and specifically to collections and their integration with customer service. Given all the publicity associated with charge-offs today, wouldn't it be a win-win to offer to waive the pay-by-phone fee to the customer if they made a payment over the minimum required, say $100? This is a great way to ensure you are not only First-in-Wallet, but also First-in-Checkbook.

3) Verification builds trust

When I travel, I stay at Marriott's because they make things easy for me and I trust their brand. When I make a reservation, I instantly get an email confirmation and I can a bill via email as well. This verifies that my reservation is in the system and I trust it is done. Why can't banks do this more often?

I have probably listened to close to 2,000 calls over the past 7 weeks for some large US Banks. Why don't more banks use email, texts, etc to give customers what they want? The number of calls that I hear where customer are verifying that their internet payment went through is absurd. It demonstrates a huge First Contact Resolution opportunity.

I could go on, but I wanted to capture these three big ingredients for your Customer Experience recipe within Financial Services. Look forward to posting more in the near future.