One of the most challenging jobs in running a Financial Services business is delighting customers.

Lately financial services firms have taken a public beating for not only falling short on service expectations but also for proposing and introducing service structures that are unacceptable to customers.

Customers consume financial transactions and interactions uniquely from each other due to the complexity and significance of managing money that is specific to their needs.

As is apparent, this contravenes historical and traditional “standardized service” paradigms for financial service providers/firms.

Defining Customer Experience

To be able to move the needle on customer experience, it’s appropriate to define it first.  I have defined it as:

“The journey of emotional and logical experiences a customer undergoes relating with satisfaction of wants and needs in an interaction.”

There are several triggers for the multitude of emotions (that reside passively) and that’s what makes this complex.

Tangibles and Intangibles

Both tangibles and intangibles, including product/service-appeal, brand positioning and representation of integrity, quantum of satisfaction from interaction (including pre and post) – all weigh on how and what customers emotionally and logically experience.

In today’s ever-changing socio-economic landscape and a market comprising of multiple generations, delivering exceptional customer experience is becoming more of an art – that can be honed with precision using a variety of innovations.

Power of Innovation

Innovation is not just a “technology-thing” – a result of R&D spending, but it’s a phenomenon across the business architecture, ranging from service/product functional creation to the method/process for interaction, delivery and consumption and is aligned closely to the culture (Booz & Company report, Oct 2011) of the financial services firm.

Customer Experience starts with the product/service itself, the appeal of the offering in delivering value and satisfaction, which as an example has been the hallmark of Apple’s market success for both iTunes service and iPod/iPhone products.

Delivering Customer Experience 2.0

Creative digitization and mechanization of customer processes, predictive analytical tools for real-time guidance for customer interaction, data federation for simplicity of information interchange are the 3 new drivers for delivering Customer Experience 2.0.

In my experiences advising and crafting innovative solutions for financial services firms across the globe, I’ve observed that creation and execution of the above drivers is not necessarily an organic competency in financial services firms, and that is one of the challenges in creating a swift transformation of the delivery of enhanced customer experience.

Do you Think Forward?  What do you think will happen in the next 3 to 5 years?