Financial Services Trends of 2017: Customer Experience

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Companies of all shapes and sizes (and industries) strive to provide a better, more consistent, customer experience. Generally speaking, some industries are ahead of others. While there are certainly outliers, many financial services companies said they’ve yet to reach “maturity” in their approach to customer experience. Couple this with the fact that, according to Edelman’s 2016 trust barometer, the financial services industry is one of the least trusted (though showing steady improvement, moving from 43% in 2012 to 51% in 2016). Since people like to do business with those they trust, it’s easy to understand why gaining customers’ trust is also paramount.
Working with many leading financial institutions, we were able to pull together a list of predictions based on our conversations with industry executives and our customers, looking back at what they’ve focused on and accomplished in 2016, and what they seek to do in 2017 and beyond.
It’s worth noting that all the trends listed share three common themes: customer experience, trust, and efficiency. In one way or another, each prediction touches on all three.
Customer experience is about making it easy and enjoyable to do business with you. Trust is about a customer’s ability to feel comfortable doing business with you. And efficiency is about getting rid of the road blocks that have the potential to challenge your ability to provide great service and that instead encourage customers to look for another company with which to do business. While these are customer-facing benefits, a company will realize tremendous gains, which can be boiled down to reduced operating costs and more customers.
As Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, shared at last year’s Adobe Summit, “This is the experience era.” There’s no doubt – across all industries, experiences are at the forefront, and will what differentiates you (as a company) from your competition. When it comes to those experiences, one trend customers often ask our Adobe practice at Perficient Digital about is omni-channel.
During WSJ’s CFO Network conference, Bank of America chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan was asked the following: “If you were building a bank today from scratch, what would be the three attributes of this new bank?” One of the key attributes of today’s bank, Moynihan noted, was the need to focus on omni-channel. “You have to be able to meet every customer, everywhere they want, and no one channel wins,” Moynihan said. Bank of America hosts 130 million consumer interactions every week, and while 123 million transactions don’t take place in a branch, 7 million still do. He went on to say that, “Despite people saying ‘I never go into a branch,’ they all do.”
Learn what other trends made the list, and download the guide here, or fill out the form below. Also, let us know what trend you are most focused on this year by leaving a comment.