The customer journey refers to the entire experience a customer has with a business, from initial awareness to becoming a loyal customer. For financial services organizations, understanding the customer journey is critical for delivering exceptional experiences and driving growth. In a market where competitors often offer the same services, like banking and wealth management, the customer service journey offers a unique chance to differentiate a business from its competitors.
At Creatives On Call, we work with over 900 financial marketing experts to deliver customized solutions to marketing and creative challenges. When it comes to optimizing the customer journey, our team takes time to deeply understand your brand and craft solutions tailored to your audience. The more you understand your customers, the better you can create a customer journey that increases acquisition, strengthens engagement and builds loyalty.
Importance of Customer Journey in the Financial Industry
With technology increasingly integrated into customer service, the financial services industry has faced a massive disruption. Customers today expect highly personalized, seamless experiences across channels. Financial institutions that fail to deliver put their growth at risk.
Understanding the customer journey is more important than ever for financial institutions to:
- Identify customer needs, desires and pain points.
- Deliver tailored products, services and experiences.
- Build trust through helpful interactions.
- Strengthen engagement across lifecycle stages.
- Gain competitive advantage with superior experiences.
Customer journey analytics provides actionable insights to enhance each touchpoint. A data-driven approach helps financial institutions align processes to how customers actually research, purchase and engage with financial products. Creatives On Call can assist your business in building data-driven approaches that use this insight for customer-centric marketing strategies.
Stages of the Customer Journey in Financial Services
While each customer journey is unique, most follow similar stages, from initial interest through retention. Key stages in the financial services customer journey include:
- Awareness: The customer realizes they need a financial product or service. This may stem from life events, marketing exposure or research.
- Consideration: The customer researches options, compares competitors and seeks recommendations. Digital content and social proof are critical.
- Purchase: The customer chooses a financial product or service. Key factors include trust, perceived value and convenience of the purchase process.
- Onboarding: The customer activates an account and conducts initial transactions. Excellent user experiences reduce friction.
- Engagement: The customer interacts with the financial brand through digital platforms, advisors and customer service. Omnichannel engagement is ideal.
- Retention: The financial firm provides ongoing value to retain the customer long-term. Loyalty programs and proactive service boost retention.
- Advocacy: Highly satisfied customers refer others and give positive reviews. Advocacy drives growth through word-of-mouth.
Challenges in Navigating the Customer Journey
While optimizing the customer journey is critical, financial institutions face major challenges, including:
- Legacy systems: Outdated technology creates friction and makes personalized experiences difficult.
- Data silos: Customer data trapped in silos inhibits a unified cross-channel view.
- Channel conflicts: Competing channel interests impede seamless omnichannel experiences.
- Security and compliance: Strict regulations require balancing experience and risk management.
- Changing customer expectations: Financial providers struggle to keep pace with digital-first customers.
- Lack of skill sets: Many financial firms lack skills in customer experience design and journey orchestration.
- Resistance to change: Developing a customer-centric culture requires changing processes and mindsets.
While substantial obstacles exist, financial services must make customer journeys a strategic priority. When you partner with our team, we bring in financial services experts who can help you organize your data, identify talent gaps and fill those gaps accordingly. Creatives On Call offers a full-service, on-demand approach to your customer journey challenges, ensuring no areas are left neglected or underserved.
Role of Digital Transformation in the Customer Journey
As mentioned, technology and digital transformation has put pressure on financial businesses to deliver personalized experiences. Your company must leverage digital technologies to provide tailored, seamless experiences across channels. This evolution aims to meet rising customer expectations and ensure long-term growth and profitability.
Digital transformation has allowed financial services organizations to gain deeper insights into their customers through data analytics. Understanding pain points and preferences along the journey enables financial institutions to streamline processes and interactions. Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can detect patterns and predict needs, which further improves the journey.
As financial services digitize, the customer journey becomes integrated across devices, platforms and channels. Omnichannel delivery provides continuity, convenience and consistency. Customers can start a process online and complete it in a branch or vice versa. Information flows seamlessly between channels to support this integration. Because our financial services professionals have years of experience in the industry, they can help develop customer experience strategies that integrate new technologies.
Personalizing the Customer Journey Through Digital Transformation
So, what are some specific ways that digital technologies can help your financial business personalize the customer journey? Let’s take a look:
Chatbots
Chatbots powered by AI can understand natural language and mimic human conversation. This allows for personalized support and advice for customers. Predictive analytics further enhances personalization by identifying the next best action in the customer journey.
Machine Learning
Technologies like machine learning and location services enable real-time personalization. Marketing and customer experience can be customized based on factors like customer demographics, past interactions and proximity to a branch location.
Customer Data
Hyper-personalization requires accessing and analyzing customer data across systems. A modern digital technology stack with application programming interfaces (APIs), automation and data analytics provides this integrated view of customer information.
The future of personalization includes capabilities like biometric authentication, predictive purchase recommendations and proximity-based advertising to customers. Financial institutions will need to ensure transparency while balancing personalization with privacy. Partnering with our seasoned marketers and industry experts helps keep you on the forefront of integrating new technology into your customer journey strategy.
Understanding the Full Customer Lifecycle in Financial Services
To fully optimize the customer journey, you must understand the full customer lifecycle. Customers engage with financial institutions across very long lifecycles, from opening their first account to retirement and estate planning decades later. Tracking customer journeys over time provides invaluable visibility.
For example, a credit card provider can map journeys across:
- Getting a starter card.
- Earning rewards and status.
- Taking out a home or auto loan.
- Planning vacations.
- Opening investment accounts.
- Saving for college.
- Entering retirement.
Seeing the full evolution of a customer relationship helps financial institutions deliver more relevant products and services when needed most. This cultivates loyalty across the complete lifecycle.
From integrating new technology to understanding the journey your customers take with your business, it’s clear that managing this lifecycle takes work, a deep understanding of data and a commitment to constantly evolving your approach. Thankfully, you don’t have to tackle this journey alone. Creatives On Call is here to utilize our expertise and help you understand your customers like never before, so you can fully maximize their experiences to build loyalty.
Connect With Creatives On Call
As an industry-leading marketing and creative consultancy, Creatives On Call specializes in helping businesses solve marketing and communications challenges. Over 100 financial institutions in the U.S. have worked with us to solve their most complex commercial challenges, and we’re eager to help you next.
In addition to helping you map out and optimize your customer journey, our teams deliver a host of creative services. From financial copywriting to data segmentation, we have hundreds of experts we work with who can deliver quality, on-demand work to you. With a deep understanding of industry challenges and trends, we’ll fill talent gaps in your team and take your business to the next level.
While we believe financial marketing services should be an ongoing effort, we can also connect you with customer journey experts for single projects. We can build teams fast and start delivering on our promises right away.
Wherever you are in your marketing journey, we’re here to meet you and get to work. Contact us today to get started.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is customer experience in financial services?
Customer experience in financial services refers to the interactions and perceptions customers have with a financial institution during the customer journey, including key touchpoints like account opening, transactions, customer support interactions and mobile or online banking experiences. Positive customer experiences lead to higher satisfaction, trust and loyalty with a financial services provider.
What is customer experience management?
Customer experience management refers to the practice of designing and managing interactions between an organization and its customers. It involves coordinating various touchpoints across marketing, sales and service to enhance the overall experience customers have when engaging with a company.
