Digitalisation Not A Cure-All For Customer Experience Shortcomings

How can financial services companies reconnect with their customers as the world remains in lockdown?

- Gareth Stokes

When you ask financial services executives about their firms’ responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, they tend to wax lyrical about their lightning-fast transition to work from home. They trumpet their ability to provide customers with seamless transactional capabilities and uninterrupted access to their digital platforms during the worst that government lockdown could throw at them. Their confidence in the innovative technologies that underpin the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) may be warranted, but it hides a sinister reality that few executives have cottoned onto.

The rapid transition to digital everything is entrenching the suboptimal customer experience that many financial services customers were exposed to before the pandemic, because new solutions depend heavily on legacy customer support infrastructure and resources. Innovations such as APIs, AI-powered chatbots and digital platforms tend to fall flat whenever a human touch is required. Another challenge facing well-established financial services brands results from dealing with customer needs “on aggregate”. This worked in the old days when paper-based systems made it impossible to tailor solutions based on an individual’s needs; nowadays a more intimate customer relationship is indicated.

Executive teams at leading financial services brands should not take to the stage to exalt their digital customer experience victories without first spending a few hours transacting on equal footing with these customers. They should be considering whether the minimal inconvenience they suffered while relocating their C-suite operations from offices to homes is like that experienced in other areas of the business.