Dive Brief:
- Nearly 9 in 10 consumers believe customer experience is as important or more important than a bank’s services or products, according to a FICO survey of 1,000 U.S. bank customers released last week.
- Consumers say easy-to-use digital services, empathetic customer support and personalized services and content are the most important factors of positive customer experiences, the survey found.
- When choosing which bank to use as their primary bank, respondents said top factors included which bank they have been using the longest and good customer service.
Dive Insight:
Customer experience is critical to fostering bank loyalty.
“Good customer experience has been a benchmark for banking for some time now because of how critical CX is to keep customers feeling safe and protected,” Darryl Knopp, senior director of portfolio marketing at FICO, said in an email. “Trust continues to be at the heart of why we stay with our banks — it’s important in how we choose our initial bank, but paramount in why we stay.”
But bad experiences can break that trust and drive people away.
Just over half of respondents say that bad customer experience has made them leave their bank, according to the survey. That finding is in line with research across sectors from Qualtrics, which found that 53% of bad experiences result in customers cutting their spending with a brand.
Banks need to maintain high-quality customer experience across all touch points and channels to foster loyalty, Knopp said. More than 3 in 5 customers say experience is as important as services or products.
Knopp encourages banks to continue improving their personalization capabilities so they can offer tailored experiences at scale and continue to build empathetic connections.
“Different people and different requests require an approach that represents the risk of the individual, the specific needs of the customer and in the context of that person's financial life,” Knopp said. That requires “a deep understanding of what that person needs versus what the bank might desire to sell.”
