Business
Redefining financial services with customer journey mapping
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on November 1, 2021
7 min readLast updated: January 29, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on November 1, 2021
7 min readLast updated: January 29, 2026
Customer journey mapping is transforming financial services by analyzing consumer behavior, enhancing digital experiences, and addressing security concerns.
By Katerina Kondrenko, Content Writer
Before heading to a physical bank branch, today’s financial consumers are thinking twice. Ever since COVID-19 hit back in early 2020, consumer behavior has changed, with more people preferring to do things online. To understand what consumers want and how they act, it’s vital to analyze their experience with banking services. So let’s take a look at what’s changed and how examining customer journey mapping for banking and finance can transform the way your business operates.
Here are some of the key statistics that define customer service needs in the finance industry today:
Knowing the statistics is helpful, but alone they won’t define market demand. For that, you need to learn more about who your customers are and what they go through. That’s when customer journey mapping for banking and finance comes into play. Here are four proven steps to help implement this methodology in your business.
This stage is all about investigating the general customer experience with your brand and their behavior. Research your buyers—their current preferences, pain points, which devices they use, and previous experiences. Then, based on this data, create your customer profile. Perhaps you developed your customer profiles (aka personas) before, but in the post-pandemic world, a lot of things have changed, so it’s time to make sure that their profiles aren’t outdated.
Once you have this data, it’s time to narrow it down and define the personas you will focus on while doing customer journey mapping or update or even redefine the existing ones. Each persona will have their own path interacting with your business. And it’s essential to know the steps they take so you can better adapt your product or service to fit their needs at each stage of the journey.
Now, you’ve understood what drives your customers. So look at which precise steps a customer persona takes when interacting with your brand. For example, explore how they come to know about your brand, which steps they take before buying, or if anything prevents them from completing a purchase.
Not to get stuck while creating a customer experience map, you can use customer journey map templates for banking and finance organizations.
If you already have a journey map, make some updates based on the new consumer reality. When doing so, you will closely investigate the general experiences and behaviors of your customers and understand where you should be directing your attention.
After creating a customer experience map, you have to analyze it. Note that this process will be more efficient if you invite your teammates and stakeholders to take part. These points will help you to get started:
Bonus: Customer experience maps aren’t limited only to your customers. You can also use the same tools with your employees to help better their experience with your working processes. Gaining an understanding of their working journey and pain points can highlight critical areas for improvement. Remember that improving your team’s experience helps employees to deliver higher levels of customer satisfaction.
Once you’ve done with analyzing and identifying all the strong and weak spots in your customer’s journey, you can proceed to the ideation part. Here you, your teammates, and stakeholders have to decide on ways to fix what’s broken and enhance what makes your clients happy, then organize those into a plan for further improvement.
Here are some expert tips on how to make your plan actionable:
Customer behavior is never stagnant and can change over time, especially in tough times like pandemics and crises. These changes affect businesses from various domains, including financial services. So it makes sense to stay on top of major changes.
To keep a competitive edge in the market, you should carefully monitor your customers’ experience. To do so effectively, look at your customer journeys and utilize them to create actionable plans to improve your product or service. Remember, businesses that use customer journey mapping provide a better consumer experience and, in doing so, retain more long-term clients.
The article discusses how customer journey mapping is transforming financial services by understanding consumer behavior and enhancing digital banking.
Post-COVID-19, more consumers prefer digital banking, leading to increased use of mobile apps and websites over physical branches.
Personalization is crucial as over 72% of customers expect tailored services from financial providers to meet their specific needs.
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