Financial institutions are constantly looking for a way to differentiate themselves from the competition. As prices and interest rates flatten for bank accounts, customer experience is looking to be the way forward. However, this is a difficult thing to maintain. Patrick Brusnahan writes
With the constant pressure on profits affecting banks, an easy way to get more from your customers in through a better, and more personalised, customer experience.
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GFT found that 67% of UK consumers would be more likely to take out a loan, credit card, or mortgage with their bank if it were able to provide personalised advice on the product. This increases to 78% amongst the 16-24 age bracket.
55% of consumers would be happy with the bank monitoring their spending habits if it was then able to improve their usage of disposable income.
Depressingly for the sector, only 10% of UK customers felt that their bank provided them with useful advice.
According to KPMG, financial services are slowly improving in their Customer Experience Excellence (CEE). The sector’s CEE rating improved by one percentage point between 2015 and 2016.
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By GlobalDataWhile the leading brand for CEE in financial service was first direct was yet another year, other institutions leaped massively. Nationwide jumped 14 places up the rankings, as did PayPal.
The customer experience balance
A common discussion point when considering customer experience is how it balances out with security. While every customer wants an easy and frictionless solution, it must be present without hindering security.
However, adding too many checks and authorisation factors can greatly hinder an experience.
Speaking to RBI, Tommy Petrogiannis, president of eSignLive, an e-signature solution company, says: “That’s something we’ve been looking at; the balance between security and customer experience. I think it’s a difficult thing to achieve perfectly.”
eSignLive has introduced ‘Smile & Sign’, a product that uses facial recognition biometrics as a factor for security.
“The whole idea behind Smile & Sign was to make it seamless for the customer to not even realise that it is taking place behind the scenes from a security aspect. It has little intrusion on what they have to do but it adds much more security than they would typically experience through using a password.”
Ross Durston, managing director of financial services at Maru/edr, says: “In terms of delivering a great customer experience, especially in financial services, there is a fine line.
“Security is key across all businesses, but I think for financial services, as you’re playing with money, it’s even more important. You could say a financial services organisation should be making everything as secure as possible, but if you went extreme on that, you’d hate it. It would be a terrible customer experience.”
Biometrics
Biometrics are often considered to be the solution to this balance. Utilising already present factors, such as fingerprints or retinas, are thought to be more frictionless than a password.
“Biometrics take multiple forms,” says Petrogiannis. “Usually there are two classes: stzatic and dynamic. Static is fingerprints or retinas which do not change. Dynamic is facial features or signatures, which change with time.”
“Traditionally, people tried to focus on static biometrics as much as possible. Only in the last few years has the price point for the tools to be able to take advantage of static biometrics been right. No we can start to introduce these sorts of technologies into everyday devices.”
Durston adds: “I think that people are becoming more agreeable now to the sorts of more frictionless security measures such as biometric. The increased adoption through mobile phone is such that banks should be leveraging it and I think they are.
“I don’t think it’ll be long until retina scanning, heartbeat sensing, or voice recognition becomes more acceptable as well. Banks may even need to be leading the way with this as security is so important there.”
On the other hand, are biometrics enough? As the sector moves towards two-factor authentication, can both factors be biometrics?
“We need multiple forms of biometric in order to cover all use cases,” Petrogiannis explains.
“There’s no perfect solution yet. If you look at fingerprints for example, certain cultures have very fine fingerprint patterns where many fingerprint scanners cannot detect the nuances or subtleties. You have to provide multiple types ideally in one package so that if there are failures, we can revert to something else which can compensate. There are limitations.”
Artificial intelligence
While creating a customer experience is a difficult challenge in itself, maintaining one is exponentially harder.
If a problem is spotted, it needs to be solved as quickly as possible. Tracking so many users is nigh impossible for a person and that’s where automation and artificial intelligence get involved.
Michael Allen, VP EMEA at American application performance management (APM) software company Dynatrace, says: “We track each and every user. Our AI looks at everything. It looks at availability issues, change in performance versus change in infrastructure, to big deviances.
“If something has slowed down by 100 milliseconds, maybe it isn’t a problem. However if it’s slowed from 100 milliseconds to seconds, that needs to be handled immediately. There’s a lot that needs to be looked at, AI does that and hones in on the real problem.”
Detecting a problem is not enough. Fixing a problem is necessary to continue great customer experiences. That’s easier said than done as issues do not necessarily have a quick fix.
“Often, a lot of time is lost not necessarily in the resolution or the detection,” Allen explains. “It’s the bit in the middle, particularly for banks.
“They have legacy systems that were built 20-30 years ago often running of the mainframe and over the years, layers upon layers of technology have been built over years. It’s finding where in that chain the culprit is as a lot of them also have different owners. That can take days, and sometimes weeks, to find the root force.
“There’s no way humans can do that, so we automate everything. By automating it, we reduce the amount of problems as it’s less prone to human errors.”
With the amount of data analysis available to financial services, it can be easy to drown in all the information. Honing on the correct problem instead of poring through terabytes of wild goose chases is crucial.
“I hate this statement, but there is a whole risk of analysis paralysis where you just don’t know where to look as there is so much data available to you,” adds Durston.
“If you structure it in the right way, what you should be able to do is driver-type analyses to help to understand the most important factors in customer experience. If you can understand the touchpoint and the customer journey, you can understand what is getting better and what is going down.”
Are customers ready to use their retinas as a password or their entire lives analysed through data?
Petrogiannis concludes: “The more people use things and the more we offer, the more massive players introduce these things. Already there’s a generation growing up with mobile phones and the education hurdle for them is not hard.
“Some people say it is too easy and wonder if it is really secure. You definitely have that element and quite often putting feedback into the solution, something as simple as a message that says you’re securely logged on, helps allay that concern. If you don’t have that feedback you get a bad reaction from a lot of first timers.”
