DIGITALLY NATIVE LOYALTY
The FinTech space is full of long-standing businesses and challenger or start-up banks, apps and platforms. This plethora of ambitious growth-focused brands means that the market is more cluttered than ever, and standing out means investing in personalised experiences that meet consumer needs.
Source: www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/financial-services/articles/uk-fintech-landscape.html
Today’s consumer isn’t just using one finance app. They have an app for banking, another for their mortgage lender and another for budget management. At the same time, merchants and businesses are choosing from a myriad of point-of-sale systems, payment gateways and customer financial data aggregators.
This explosion of FinTech companies and start-ups isn’t all that surprising when we consider the tech-savvy millennial generation and the subsequent Gen Z and Xs - banking and financial options have had to evolve to cater for a more digitally native audience. The once rare perk of mobile banking is now a standard, and traditional brick-and-mortar institutions have to become increasingly tech-enabled to serve the needs and demands of the digital-first user.
3 TIPS TO SEAMLESS COMMERCE
#1 Make the entire payment journey as easy, flexible and seamless as possible
Financial payment process companies have made it easier to move money around, and we’ve seen the exponential growth of the buy-now-pay-later integrations in eCommerce, attracting younger consumers.
The end goal is always the same - people want to make their payments as fast as possible, in as simple a way as possible and feel safe and secure when performing those transactions. Whether through Clear Pay, Stripe or Klarna, users are increasingly choosing to do business with those that offer them ultimate flexible, water-tight security confidence and that promise the most seamless transactional experience for the end user.
#2 Remember that the digital CX is the difference between loyalty, a happy customer, and an abandoned cart!
The battle for loyalty in this space largely depends on who can offer the best customer experience. While interacting with a product or service, customers experience a vast range of emotions, from excitement and trust to apprehension and fear, influencing the consumer’s perception of a product and company.
Creating positive emotions and touchpoints can help brands develop and increase customer trust and satisfaction.
#3 You have to offer the path of least resistance
Humans are hard-wired to follow the path of least resistance. We naturally pick the path of least resistance when making decisions. When it comes to banking, financial or high-value decision-making, there is even more vital importance: the actual user and having the most seamless, enjoyable customer experience.
Your user experience can be the pull or push that results in either winning a customer or seeing them abandon the cart and run for the door!
The rapid shift in digital adoption by consumers for payments has been significant for the digital payment FinTech space. The payment gateway stage in eCommerce decides whether your customer completes their purchase or leaves an abandoned cart and, more important, whether they will risk transacting with you again in future.
At any stage along a customer journey, there is a rise in dropoff and journey failure if friction is present. Frictionless is the goal for CX!
HOW TO DELIVER GREAT CX IN FINTECH
Customers want to trust and feel safe with their banking service provider or commerce decisions. Your customer experience should help them develop that trust in the financial product or service.
Educate
We are all worried about the cost of living, recessions, wars, and economic challenges.
Customers are worried, confused and unsure about who to trust. FinTechs can step up and help ensure their customers get complete and transparent information by regularly sharing knowledge or sharing updates about changes in government regulations.
Offering self-serve options such as regularly updated FAQs and chatbots can help elevate the overall customer experience. Making human contact possible with 24/7 customer support is another way to amplify your CX offering to ensure consumers have positive feelings of support, trust, and belief in you as a provider.
Engage
A good and successful customer experience ensures customers can engage positively and informally to fulfil their needs and expectations. Being active in notifying customers about how financial markets can affect them and how they could mitigate their risk is one way of ensuring a positively engaged customer experience.
A great example of this is Monzo’s lending app; it reminds users not to miss their payments and actively celebrates when they make on-time payments.
FinTechs should harness customer data and deploy predictive behaviour analytics to better tailor personalised content and understand their customer's financial needs. Intelligent product recommendations based on a customer profile, data, spending patterns, and affordability can help the user feel they are being specifically tailored to.
User-centric design should always be the central focus of any digital marketing and user journey. User-centric design thinking involves empathy maps, focused user research, and intuitive navigation tools. These factors can all help build strong UX, which contributes to the overall CX of the brand.
Listen
It may seem overly obvious to say that customers want to be heard, but today’s consumers can readily express their thoughts and feelings about a product or service to not just friends and family but to their socially and digitally connected, larger social networks.
With social proof being a key influence for audiences, your customer service team must be geared up to encourage feedback while implementing a responsive customer care system to ensure this feedback is fed into delivering great customer experiences.
IN A NUTSHELL
Today’s digitally native consumers demand transparency, flexibility, security and seamless experiences. If you want to stand out from your competitors and keep ahead of the disruptive FinTechs encroaching on the market, then optimising your customer experience must be a priority. You can achieve this by:
- Educating your market on the economic challenges and opportunities
- Engaging users through the delivery of great experiences and need fulfilment
- Listening to what your customers are saying and feeding this back into your delivery
Still concerned about your brand’s customer experience challenges? Get in touch with one of our behavioural experts, we’d love to hear from you.
