By John Riley, Director, Digital Experience at Cognizant
The financial services sector has had a somewhat paradoxical pandemic. Mobilising teams to work remotely overnight while retaining high levels of service and security was a mammoth task for a complex, highly regulated industry and it inevitably made for some highly stressful times. It’s an event few would like to see repeated.
Yet, the pandemic was also a watershed moment, as efforts received by grateful customers accelerated the redemptive arc the sector has been on for the past decade or so since the 2008 crash.
Over the last year and a half, banks have been a vital lifeline for businesses and individuals as lockdowns decimated the economy and halted employment. There is a new appreciation from customers of what banks can do for them and a reinvigorated sense of purpose within the institutions themselves.
Customers value employee willingness to go the extra mile, translating into a superior customer experience. In fact, those moments when employees have the right information, tools and empowerment to help customers can be brand defining. But, employees can’t demonstrate that empathy or go above and beyond if they themselves don’t feel supported. In extraordinary circumstances, financial organisations did all they could to help remote working staff. They moved beyond day-to-day management, from checking in on employees’ mental wellbeing to investing in technologies to reduce some of the burden of dealing with hundreds of queries every day.
Now that financial services companies have shown they can deliver on customer experience while supporting employees in a crisis, it’s time to embrace those learnings and apply them to the everyday working.
It’s not just an empty assertion – there is plenty of proof that caring for employees translates into superior customer experience. But despite that, historically, there has not been enough of a focus on employee experience in banking and financial services.
More than half (58%) of companies we surveyed in partnership with Forrester agreed that they were not investing enough in employee enablement which was, in turn, hindering their CX performance.
What does employee enablement look like? Certainly, the aforementioned mental health wellbeing check-ins for remote staff were important during moments of high stress, but the way to make sure employees feel valued and empowered to deliver great customer experience is much more fundamental.
Companies have underinvested in initiatives to align systems, workflows and technologies that allow employees to deliver their intended outcomes. The result is cumbersome processes that impact both the engagement of employees and the end customer, such as unnecesary delays in getting information, inaccurate responses, the need to use many channels (i.e. the call center, mobile app and branch) the need to repeat requests.
This misalignment can have any number of knock-on effects – employees miss internal targets resulting in stress and possible sanctions when they had little power to change the outcome; exasperated customers take their frustrations out on front-line staff impacting their mental health. Either way, this increases cost to serve, reduces customer and employee satisfaction and ultimately, leads to high staff turnover and customer churn.
Unsurprisingly, CX leaders in the financial services sector are much more likely to enable all parts of the experience ecosystem, including improving employee enablement. Nearly half (44%) of all FS CX leaders believe this completely describes their company’s vision, compared to a little over a quarter of followers (28%). And when asked if their employees were successful in delivering the business’s CX vision, 87% of FS CX leaders agreed compared to 65% of followers.
Providing the systems and processes that make the day-to-day execution of their role easier is key to employee enablement. Leaders and followers both prioritise improving the human experience through digital enablement in our survey, including access to a productive work environment and the resources they need to solve client problems. But, inevitably, there’s room for improvement.
It is natural that all organisations, not just financial services, should focus on delivering the best customer experience possible. It is a defined goal against which you can both measure brand success and deliver revenue growth. But it cannot be achieved without focusing on your employees too. The level of customer experience they deliver is a direct reflection of their own, internal experience and enablement. A happy employee doesn’t means more than a happy customer – it is a win for the business as well.
