Dive Brief:
- Citizens Financial Group is adding features to boost digital experience with the introduction of advanced appointment scheduling and a virtual digital financial assistant, the company said Tuesday.
- It also streamlined its mobile onboarding experience, added a savings tracker to set and achieve personal savings goals and introduced a checking accounts benefit calculator.
- “We know managing your finances, including switching to a new bank, can be daunting and our goal is to simplify this journey,” Chris Powell, head of deposits and customer engagement, said in a prepared statement. “Our new onboarding experience and other digital enhancements make banking quick and convenient.”
Dive Insight:
Citizens’ efforts to update its digital capabilities and provide quality customer service is in a response to careful customer listening.
“We recognize that quality customer service and digital banking are essential factors in selecting a primary banking relationship and we remain committed to meeting the evolving needs of our customers,” Powell said.
The importance of digital banking capabilities has grown since the pandemic — more consumers want to do all their banking on their phones instead of in-person or on a desktop browsers.
Mobile is an “orchestration channel,” Catherine Lynch, head of digital experience and human centered design at Citizens, told CX Dive in August. Many customers start within mobile and may then continue on to different channels.
“We have to really think about those sort of starting trigger tendencies, and then when you transition to the other experiences, how you flow through that,” Lynch said. “Journey design, journey mapping of those experiences is critical. Layering in the jobs that customers are trying to do on that journey — it's really critical to making sure that we're delivering a good experience through that type of flow.”
Citizens is not alone in zeroing in on digital banking and customer service, as customers are clear on their needs and willingness to switch banks.
Nine in 10 consumers say quality customer service and digital banking are important factors in choosing a bank, and three-quarters said that they would change banks if another better met their needs, according to a Motley Fool Ascent survey from August.
Banks are upping their investments in virtual assistants as well, with both Bank of America and U.S. Bank improving their generative AI-powered chatbots.
Citizen’s AI-powered virtual assistant, CiZi, provides personalized banking support on such tasks as setting up direct deposit to adding a debit card to a digital wallet. Citizens plans to launch additional features to improve the digital experience in early 2025.
