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.

How customer behavior has changed in banking and finance

Here are some of the key statistics that define customer service needs in the finance industry today:

• Increasing digitization. In the Accenture Global Banking Consumer Study, we see that the acceleration of brick and mortar branch closures, caused by lockdowns, led to the increase of consumers (~50%) who use mobile apps and websites to access banking services, compared to 32% in 2018. Meanwhile, in the US only, the volume of transactions handled by physical banks has fallen by 30-40%. At the same time, McKinsey & Company’s article says that from 15 to 20% of Spanish, Italian, and US bank consumers are ready to continue using digital channels to interact with their banks even after COVID restrictions end. In Western European markets, this figure jumps even higher (to ~80%).
• Security concerns. Rapid bank digitization has triggered digital security concerns. For instance, in Australia, bank consumers distrust digital banking channels, which means that banks will have to invest more than ever to gain consumer trust and boost their security. Similarly, neobanks are also facing challenges in gaining consumer trust in the long term, despite the tech know-how. For instance, Plum states that over 91% of their customers also have a brick-and-mortar bank account linked.
• Personalization. Advances in technology have made it more possible than ever before for financial providers and other businesses to tailor their services to the consumer. Over 72% of customers believe that this is a must-have for any financial service provider.

Four actionable steps to outstanding customer experience

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.

Step 1: Define your customers

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.

Step 2: Map your customers’ current experience

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.

Step 3: Analyze the experience map

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:

• Trace your customer experience at different stages of the journey. You can gain a lot of insight into how your customers are getting engaged with your business. You may find out that some customer journey steps have changed. Or you may discover areas of your business that could be prime for customer engagement.

• Consider communication channels. Banks should pay attention to how and through what channels their clients want to communicate. For example, the bank only had a hotline to call in on, which was always busy, making clients feel disappointed. To solve this issue, the bank developed a chatbot and, by improving the communication process, enhanced customers’ satisfaction.
• Don’t forget about the stages of the journey that take place online. Since more and more financial customers go online, and for some of them this experience is new, it would be wise to see whether everything goes smoothly or requires some adjustments.

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.

Step 4: Ideate and come up with an actionable plan

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:

• Make upgrades that require minimum effort. As the financial services industry is heavily regulated, you can start with the steps that you can quickly bring into play without violating any rules. For example, check when you last updated your website. Invest in this activity and consider how to make it more convenient for your customers, e.g., by creating content articles that provide a how-to guide for your clients or even a chatbot to address your customer concerns.
• Involve the right people at the right time. To speed up your plan’s implementation, ensure you engage all the relevant stakeholders at the appropriate time. This way, everyone will be aware of the potential problems and be available to help at the proper time.
• Prioritize between strategies. Some good ideas only seem to be good. That’s why it’s vital to build hypothesis-testing into your working plan. Create “what-if” scenarios or service blueprints to see whether your plan is worth implementing. It doesn’t guarantee that the chosen idea will work out after implementation, yet it helps to filter out the ones that most likely wouldn’t.

Next steps to take

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.