Customer Experience (CX) Trends for Banks & Credit Unions in 2023

Banks and credit unions don’t have to pay high fees to become best-in-class in customer experience. They just need to start thinking like a tech company — constantly. Get inspired by top trends that will be shaping the banking and credit unions next decade.

Banks are the last place customers will laud about getting a great experience. The average Net Promoter Score score for banking and financial institutions is 34. That’s a sorry figure. As we are moving forward in 2023, banks cannot excuse themselves from not providing a top-notch experience to their customers. In this article, we are going to look at customer experience trends for banks and credit unions that will take center stage in the year 2023.

In the United States, 40 to 45 percent of affluent customers who switched their banks in the past 24 months moved to a digitally-led firm, according to McKinsey.

Customer experience trends in 2023 for banks and credit unions:  

1. More focus on connecting with customers:  

Banks and credit unions have poor customer satisfaction numbers. A simple glance at any customer satisfaction report among various industries will give you an idea about banks’ stature. Of late, financial institutions have focused on creating digital capabilities that will improve their customer satisfaction numbers. Contact centers have a high correlation with customer experience, but it ranks the lowest among all bank channels. 

Improving contact centers will have a great effect on customer service. Customers call contact centers and it is the first opportunity for banks to provide a great experience. By providing quick responses and clear answers for the issues they face, banks can improve their customer experience. In 2023, financial institutions will need to revamp how they offer their services at a customer care center.  

Read Next: Top 8 Retail Banking Trends And Predictions For 2023

2. Community and Personalization: 

The idea of niche banking is set to become even bigger. Banks that focus on specific market segments are seeing great results. The reason why a few financial institutions struggle is because they are not sure which products and services should be pitched to different segment of customers.  

In a niche banking model, customers come first. Only when they have a customer-first attitude is it possible to understand their needs truly and engage with them. Here are a few questions that banks and credit unions should ask if they want to pursue a niche: 

• How many people have shown the same pattern of behavior? 
• How do you reach these people? 
• How many customers do you need to be profitable? 
• Will the niche sustain for a long time? 
• What are the products and services that the customers in this niche are interested in?  

So how do you get started? Well, here are five different strategies that you can consider for planning your personalized customer banking experience. 

Read Next: 5 Strategies On Building A Personalized Banking Experience

3. Online Advisory Services:

The pandemic has presented a new opportunity where advisory sessions can be conducted online. Even though online advisory has been in existence for quite some time, it didn’t enjoy the patronage that it does now. Online advisory services have become a part of the new normal.  

Banking institutions need to put more effort and come up with services for their customers by expanding them. Online advisory services can include in-house financial advisors who provide personalized solutions to customers. It is also an opportunity to upsell and cross-sell a number of other services during the advisory sessions.  

4. Integration of automation with processes:

Automating various processes will not only help optimize customer interactions, but it will also improve the efficiency of employees. The key to offering great customer experience is to prioritize the convenience of the customer. With automation, banks can expedite the customer onboarding process, eliminate friction around important tasks, provide personalized responses to pressing queries, gather feedback through automated email campaigns, and so on.  

It increases the speed of decision making, mitigates wait-times by a huge margin, tracks transactions, and detects fraud. 59% of financial leaders believe that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) will make their business competitive in the coming years.  

5. Empowering financial wellness and trust: 

According to Accenture, only 29% of customers believed that their banking provider would look after their financial well-being. There is a big connection between financial wellness and customer experience as they are looking at ways to improve their financial well-being. Banks can do this by providing financial advice and offering actionable insights which helps them manage their money better.  

Financial service providers stand to gain the trust of their consumers by offering them advice on how to build their savings, create generational wealth, and achieve their short-term and long-term financial goals. According to the Consumer Financial Literacy Survey, only 25% of customers said that they will seek the help of their bank for financial education. That’s a sad number there. This is an area that banking institutions should spend a lot of effort on.  

6. Branch of the Future:

Customers might not be open to visiting banks in person like they did earlier. It doesn’t mean that banks should stop having physical locations. Internet banking has ensured that the dependence on physical banks gets reduced drastically. Banks will reimagine their idea of what a physical bank branch should look like. The branch of the future could be attractive showroom-style places that lays out their services and products in an appealing manner.  

It could be a place where there are exclusive one-to-one interactions and they can also be used as a revenue generating option. The branch of the future should offer a number of functionalities for it to make sense. Community spaces, advisory services, Interactive Teller Machines, interactive digital walls and signage, self-service options, etc., are some of the ideas that they could incorporate in it.  

7. Hyper Personalization:

A Boston Consulting Group research says that personalization at scale can increase annual revenue by 10%. With online retailers and tech-focused companies offering highly personalized solutions, banking consumers have started expecting the same. By using existing customer data and analyzing customer touchpoints, banks can offer highly meaningful and hyper personalized experiences. For this to happen, banks should have a strategic approach to personalization. 

Banks will start using data and analytics to forecast individual needs of customers and use them to build great relationships that will last for a long time. Let it be known that hyper personalization in banking is not about selling alone, it’s about providing the right information and advice several times.  

Whether you’re a credit union or a banking firm providing a wealth of financial services, check out this webinar on how hyper-personalize can help improve your banking customer experience across touch-points.

8. Increased engagement: 

Thanks to advanced analytics, financial institutions have a deep level of insight into customer behavior and expectation that they did not possess earlier. In 2023, customers want more engagement from their banking partners. Banks should proactively monitor their customers’ financial health and offer them assistance on wealth management.  

The engagement can happen across a number of channels, depending on what the customers prefer. Offer an omnichannel engagement for your customers so that they will have a smooth experience across every channel that they use. You can expect more banks to care about the interests of the customers to show that they add value to their lives.  

Read Next: Data-Driven Banking: How Is Data Changing The Banking Landscape?

10. Cryptocurrencies:

Even though cryptocurrencies have a high degree of risk, there will be increasing pressure on regulating them. Governments are looking at creating a regulatory framework for crypto. There will be a lot of focus on methods to store cryptocurrency assets, tax evasion, fraud prevention, etc. Once there are more investors in cryptocurrency, there will be customer experience issues. Between October 2020 and March 2021, more than 70,000 people reported losses of $80 million due to cryptocurrency scams. In 2023, you will see a number of announcements by banking and financial institutions about their cryptocurrency services.  

Strategies for improving customer experience in banking: 

1. Be customer-focused in all activities: 

For banks to be customer-centric, they need to keep the customer at the center of everything. Try to continually improve every little process and policy that is put in place. Find out which are the resources that your customers want the most.  

2. Close the feedback loop: 

Ask for feedback from your customers at a number of interaction touchpoints. Provide your customers an opportunity to share their thoughts about their experience with your bank. Follow up with every response that you get by closing the feedback loop. Thank the customer for their valuable time in sharing their opinion and solving their issues, if there are any.  

3. Have a dedicated customer success team: 

In most banking institutions, customer experience is almost an afterthought. If you want to upgrade the experience you offer to your customers, then you need to have a dedicated team working towards it. Leverage the skills and expertise of managers from different teams to get a variety of perspectives.  

4. Collect data across every touchpoint: 

Before you even start to formulate a plan for customer experience, you need to have a lot of information about your customers. For that, it is important that you collect data from all your touchpoints to see if they are getting a consistent experience across all channels. You will find major friction areas in your customer service by collecting data across multiple touchpoints.  

Conclusion: 

The financial services industry has never been the same after 2020. They are rapidly shifting towards a model where they focus immensely on providing quality customer experiences. The future of banking looks promising for consumers with increased convenience. For banks, this would translate into fiercer competition and the need to focus more on customer engagement and retention strategies.

If you are looking for a technology partner to help your banking institution move further ahead of your competitors, the team at Zuci will be glad to help you out. We have technology experts with years of experience in helping credit unions, banks, and other financial institutions to achieve digital transformation. Let’s talk.