By Kristina Leach, director, Global FSI Insights
Putting customers first makes sense. It delivers positive outcomes for both financial organisations and customers, driving trust and loyalty. However, as much as a customer-centric mindset makes sense, it isn’t something that’s been enforced – until now.
In August 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Consumer Duty rules come into effect. Designed to fundamentally improve how the financial sector serves retail customers, the Duty sets “higher and clearer standards of consumer protection” and stipulates that customers’ needs are put first.
While the Duty has been created mainly to protect customers from being misled or making poor financial decisions without being given all the appropriate information, there are additional considerations to take on board as well. To comply with the new rules, financial institutions (FIs) must review and potentially enhance their products and services to optimise each customer experience (CX). This is not a choice, and FIs will need to be able to prove that they’ve done it and continue to do it. With more and more financial interactions taking place online, the digital arena will be massively impacted, but compliance should be viewed as an opportunity.
There are a handful of areas FIs can focus on, from journey analytics and building a cross-channel understanding of customer behaviour to providing evidence of compliance via session replay. The Duty requires FIs to consider the needs, characteristics and objectives of consumers – including vulnerable ones – and how they behave at every stage of the customer journey.
Customer experience visibility
For firms to comply with the Duty (and remain competitive), digital experiences can’t be “unclear or confusing” (rule 9.18), meaning optimising CX is crucial. That’s where journey analytics comes into play, allowing FIs to monitor and review customers’ online experiences and understand how smooth (or not) their interactions are.
Journey analytics is a data-driven approach that tracks page actions, errors, frustrations and behaviours, allowing firms to retrace customers’ journeys and truly empathise with them. By pinpointing the moment they’re derailed, it’s possible to identify friction points and usability issues and fix them accordingly.
Collecting voice of the customer (VoC) feedback is another way to track and respond to customers’ concerns. But VoC alone doesn’t indicate the size and scale of a problem. For a more comprehensive understanding, one-click quantification is a powerful way to augment VoC. With a single tap, it’s possible to see how many customers have experienced the same issue and measure the overall effect on revenue. That helps FIs prioritise fixes by focusing on the most significantly impacted areas, be it rage clicks, JavaScript errors or slow API calls.
Visibility into the customer experience is also achieved via real-time behavioural KPI alerting and friction monitoring, enabling organisations to react quickly when customer frustration arises. Real-time rescue is a handy tool to employ here. Depending on the situation, firms may send personalised offers, a survey to understand the problem better, email updates on enhancements, or prompts to join a chat.
Building an omnichannel understanding of customer behaviour
These days, many financial services customers use multiple channels to interact with their providers. They may start a process online and then call the contact centre to complete it, particularly if they face friction. According to our retail banking survey, 52% of UK respondents prefer leveraging several channels.
To ensure digital journeys aren’t “unclear or confusing”, FIs should use behavioural analytics to evaluate customer interactions across channels, helping them understand how people act and why, enabling accurate predictions about their future behaviour.
By better understanding what people want from products and services, firms can create a more seamless and personalised CX, reducing churn and increasing customer lifetime value. FIs should factor contact centres in, too. By arming customer support employees with real-time visibility into the digital experiences people are having, they can serve customers quicker and more efficiently. For example, if an individual rings in with a problem, finding a resolution is much easier if the agent has session replay tools at their disposal. That way, they can see exactly where the person had an issue (and why).
Providing evidence of compliance with session replay
Alongside striving to deliver good customer outcomes, FIs also need to prove they’re being met should it be questioned. This means demonstrating that the appropriate information was collected from and provided to customers, enabling them to make informed decisions. But how can this be done across thousands of digital encounters each week?
Enter, Session Replay. For guaranteed compliance, FIs will need to capture 100% of user sessions and have them on hand when required. Long-term storage of session replays will therefore become critical, as will linking session replays directly to contact centre calls, giving regulators in-depth accounts of actions firms took.
This data-driven approach provides a wealth of customer insights that can improve CX and help protect the customer, while ensuring FCA compliance is built in from the outset.
Driving better relationships with the Consumer Duty
Satisfying the new rules is no small task. But by optimising CX, delivering real-time support, and bridging the gap between online and phone channels, firms are well on the way to regulatory compliance and becoming truly customer-centric – win-win.
