More than ever before, it has become important for every company to provide efficient customer experience in order not to loose customers to competitors. The situation is the same in the financial sector, where customers have choices and keeping them happy is key to ensuring their loyalty, which can become a tool for acquiring prospective customers.
- Having a CX Plan: Every achievement starts with a plan. Do you have an effective customer experience plan? In order to make customer experience your institution-wide priority, you need to have a dynamic customer experience plan that implements strategies adaptable to your enterprise.
- Aim to always delivery efficient services: Provide customers with 24/7 access to banking services at their convenient location and across preferred multiple channels. In order to build loyal and long-term customer relationships, you will need to make positive banking experience a reality. By taking steps to ensure that your customer needs are met in all their interactions with your institution will enable you to remain competitive, build trust and loyalty.
- Make customers feel valued: The survey by Forbes shows that 90% of customers who feel valued will promote your financial institution. Customers want to feel valued, appreciated, and confident that they are getting good services. You will have their loyalty and build a trusting relationship when your customers have a great experience. They will be happy to recommend your institutions’ offerings to others, adding more value to your business.
- Consider lowering transaction fees: A recent survey of bank customers conducted by qualtrics shows that higher fees are the main reasons customers leave their bank to competitors followed by poor service delivery. The respondents confirmed that lowering transaction fees and improving services quality can save them from leaving. Also, low fees can be applied to high volume transactions or customers that have stayed with you for many years.
- Promptly address complaints and obtain customer feedbacks: Qualtrics interviewed over 550 banking customers to learn what they expect in their banking experience, and what they will do if they don’t get it. 69% of customers surveyed listed poor services as the primary reason for leaving. Obtaining feedback from customers on their recent interaction with your institution will enable you to identify areas of the business that requires improvement. Although, lowering transaction fees can be effective, resolving poor customer experience might be more rewarding. It is important to quickly address customer complaints and resolve issues making them unhappy with your services. Identify customer interaction touch points on all channels and monitor customer journey in order to obtain feedback on experiences. By finding ways to meet their needs will ultimately retain highly valuable repeat customers who will spread the good news about your institution.
- Have a loyalty programme: Putting in place a loyalty programme would imply to customers that you care about them and recognise the contribution as a key component of your business. For instance, developing a program that rewards your regular customers with redeemable points that can be utilized to make purchases like phone bill payment and more.
- Obtain Referrals from your Happy Customers: Another avenue for customer acquisition is to contact your happy customers and request them to refer their friends and families. This might form part of a acquisition program strategy requiring some investment that might result in higher ROI in the long run.
- Multichannel Experience: A further approach is analysing and identifying most relevant and frequently used channels by customers and implementing acquisition strategy accordingly, rather than focusing on all channels that may result in much investment but less result.
- Social Media Banking and Visibility: Nowadays, prospective customers usually perform an online search and compare FIs services before actually making a decision. It is very important to have an excellent and appealing social media presence where you can respond to customer questions and inquiries, and share quality industry trends. Your institution can offer innovative solutions via social platforms like social media banking, allowing customers to access financial services via social media platforms.
- Take banking Services to Customer Locations: An effective acquisition strategy is to take banking services to customer especially in remote locations. This can be achieved by using a core banking system that support online and offline connections and accessible via mobile devices like tablets and so on. Inclusive banking systems such as this, empowers your field officers to take banking services to customer locations, which is a viable solution for ensuring financial inclusion.
Ahead banking software is a future-proofed inclusive core banking system for Microfinance, Credit Unions, Savings and Loans, and Digital-only financial institutions with efficient functionalities for customer acquisition and effective service delivery. Contact us today!
