80% of consumers consider digital banking their preferred way to bank, but only 65% reported being highly satisfied with their digital banking solution, according to the ath Power Consumer Digital Banking Study. As your financial institution builds out its digital strategy – adopting new online and mobile technologies to help stay competitive and attract new clients – it must also take steps to ensure it’s providing a consistent, seamless and positive user experience (UX) across the board.
Another market study finds that 52% of consumers said a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company, while another 83% said that a seamless experience across all devices is somewhat or very important. With consumers expressing interest in opening loan accounts and checking accounts online, you don’t want a poor UX to be the reason revenue opportunities are left on the table or customers leave for a competitor.
That’s where UX design comes into play. It isn’t just about the color of your app or the flow of your website; it’s about everything that encompasses a user experience. It requires extensive research, testing and validation – data that can help you make informed decisions and empower your bank or credit union to provide a positive UX that spans both digital and physical.
Here are a few things to consider as your move forward with UX design and your digital strategy.
1. Focus on Your Target Audience
When moving forward with digital and the user experience you want to provide, it’s important to focus on your target audience first and foremost. Identify who that audience is, and what their natural workflow entails. Remember, you can provide multiple different experiences for different target markets. Not everyone wants the same digital engagement.
Using a strategy called experiential design, you can craft a narrative and map out what your audience’s physical and digital experience would be throughout the day. This could include identifying the digital channels they might use, where those channels might cross over and when would the physical experience would come in.
Whether you’re building an app or developing your online presence, you’ll want to test for the experiences your customers might want or need before your team lays down code. By incorporating these experiences into the design from the very beginning, you can save time and money on future iterations of your app or website, as well as ensure your digital strategy is agile.
2. Enable Your Customers to Make Decisions
Your UX design should also be predictive, automated and anticipatory of what consumers’ needs so they’re empowered to easily make decisions. By using predictive analytics and artificial intelligence – readily available technologies – financial institutions can create applications that are personalized for individual users, increasing consumer loyalty and giving your institution a competitive advantage.
Here’s an example of what this might look like:
Your customer signs into a banking app that includes a virtual assistant (or chatbot). The customer’s account history, such as when they pay for bills or other items, would be securely and anonymously analyzed to provide contextual information for the chatbot. This chatbot, with an intelligent back-end and some natural language processing, could then make personalized recommendations.
If that consumer made a large purchase on a debit card that’s going to result in a checking account overdraft, the chatbot could recommend transferring money from savings to avoid the bounce. Or, it could offer a microloan to be paid off over a few months.
By surfacing these type of recommendations, the chatbot is providing the consumer with a personalized experience and enabling them to make an informed decision. All they would need to do is select the option they prefer and then bio-authenticate it to move forward.
By being predictive and anticipatory, and incorporating these capabilities into the UX design of your mobile app, you can provide personalized recommendations that create a whole new experience. Consumers will appreciate that your institution is looking out for them. This can increase their loyalty, and bring new opportunities and revenue streams to your institution.
3. Use Data to Inform Your Design
The only two companies in the world that have reached a $1 trillion valuation are Apple and Amazon. Both of these firms use data to prioritize design and the user experience. They know that data impacts design, design drives conversions, and conversions result in revenue.
With this as the foundation, they ground their design-based decisions in data. They’re frequently pointed to as companies that exemplify what a positive user experience should look like, and their revenue has soared as a result.
Your bank or credit union might not be the Apple or Amazon of the financial services industry – at least not yet – but with frequent consumer engagement, your organization has ample opportunities to make design decisions that are backed by data. From identifying the capabilities your customers might want to help them to make decisions, the data you have can provide the experience they want (and expect) from companies today.
By simplifying the consumer’s daily financial life, these data-backed design decisions can also help your organization achieve its sales, satisfaction, loyalty and revenue goals.
Bringing It All Together
There’s a lot more to UX design than meets the eye. It’s not just about the color of your digital paintbrush. It’s about how design and the user experience can be integrated across your entire organization … at every touchpoint and engagement. It’s about how well you understand what consumers want and how this informs your design decisions. These two depend on each other, and this is what will open new business opportunities and revenue streams for your institution, while strengthening your brand and enhancing your customer loyalty.