With the pandemic driving an increased reliance on digital platforms, brands have been forced to evolve their customer experience (CX) design. Optimising your design with the customer experience in mind plays a critical role in ensuring your digital platforms are user-friendly and accessible, helping to enable greater customer acquisition and conversions. Consumers want high-quality CX that places their needs at the forefront. In fact, 76% of consumers already expect companies to understand their needs and expectations and 73% of consumers say a good CX design is key in influencing their brand loyalties. Keeping up-to-date with what consumers expect is critical for retaining customers, building brand loyalty and converting leads. So, what are the CX design trends for 2022?
Human connection
Customer service is often seen as one of the top reasons for cultivating consumer loyalty, trust and retention, yet is often scored the lowest in customer satisfaction scores. In fact, 47% of customers would switch brands after a poor customer experience and 91% would leave without warning. While people are doing their banking more and more online, they still desire human connection when contacting customer service.
80% of consumers say speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service are the top things they’re looking for when interacting with customer service. Your finance brand should therefore prioritise technologies that support these core areas rather than ones you adopt simply because they’re considered cutting edge. Technology like AI and chatbots are becoming expected from customers as they enable easy queries to be solved quickly while remaining personalised and ‘human’.
CX design as a product
“ “Brands can no longer rely on a plethora of products as their main selling point; instead, they will have to use CX to differentiate themselves.” – Judy Weader, Senior Analyst at Forrester ”
With the pandemic making digital financial management the new norm this is likely to stay around for years to come. Owing to this, your finance brand’s CX design is now a key cornerstone for customers’ decision-making and choice to work with you. As Judy Weader, Senior Analyst at Forrester asserts, “Brands can no longer rely on a plethora of products as their main selling point; instead, they will have to use CX to differentiate themselves.”
In this regard, the CX design improvements your finance brand has made across the pandemic must be maintained and continually updated to ensure customer retention. Consumers now expect a forward-thinking, personalised, and easy-to-use online experience. Without constantly improving your CX you are losing out to brands that do.
Financial wellness and improved trust
According to Accenture, only 29% of people trust their banks to look after their financial wellbeing compared with 43% two years ago. Consumers are wanting more help from their finance organisations with the pandemic increasing financial uncertainty globally. There’s now a link between financial wellness, CX design and customer satisfaction. This indicates a growing need from consumers for their finance providers to help them understand how to manage their money.
Offering educational resources and tools to manage spending easier are some ways to improve the financial wellness of your clients. Consider what your clients need and are struggling with when creating a customer-focused CX design.
Why CX design is important for financial marketers to consider
CX design is now one area consumers consider the most important when making their decisions. Ensuring you maintain the digital evolution your brand has adopted is critical to ensuring you retain customers and improve conversion rates. Think about the customer’s needs, digital habits, and wants first and foremost in your overall customer experience design.
