10 ways to improve customer experience in banking

Now that we’ve explored customer experience expectations for the financial services industry, let’s dive into putting ideas into practice. Here are 10 ways you can improve customer experience in banking:

1. Automate the credit card selection and application process

One of the easiest ways to meet banking customer experience expectations is through offering live chat that aids in account selection and application. Investing app Acorns has successfully implemented a smooth onboarding process, after they identified that a key issue with existing solutions included “poor online user experiences, especially around account opening.”

The Chief Commercial Officer for the brand shared that the new user registration process takes 3-5 minutes, and they have live chat support standing by. Having resources and support just a click away helps reduce friction when opening up a new account. 

2. Offer quick support for routine tasks

Chatbots are another useful way to assist the customer’s experience at scale. Both potential and existing customers can use chatbots anytime, anywhere to get information on new products or existing account activity. Companies like Wells Fargo have implemented chatbots that offer customers a faster way to check balances or find an ATM, while other banks have also used chatbots to help users activate a new card and find statements.  

3. Make sure employee and customer-facing knowledge bases are up to date

While having live chat, chatbots, and more to support customers is great, the efforts are for nothing if your knowledge base, made up of FAQs and helps docs, isn’t up to date. Putting time into creating an accurate knowledge base that’s easy for both customers and your internal support team to use is crucial. 

After all, your support employees need accurate information to resolve issues and maintain a consistent experience. Your knowledge base is also helpful for onboarding new chatbots by giving them information to learn from.

If you want a self-service FAQ that’s in tip-top shape, hire copywriters to create engaging FAQ copy, and A/B test documentation pages to better understand user preferences. 

4. Be a champion of transparency 

Another potential competitive advantage that your financial institution can implement is transparency. Digital bank Monzo recognized that they faced an uphill battle earning customer trust, so they’ve implemented a policy of “radical transparency.”

Some of the ways they put this idea into practice are disclosing how they use customer deposits, sharing their future plans for the app, and asking their customers what else they should be sharing.