Your customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) are the foundations of a comprehensive digital strategy. Providing the convenient, relevant, and personalized experience consumers expect and marrying it with a parallel employee process that attracts, trains and retains talent is important in driving success through your financial institution’s digital transformation.
The push to digital can seem formidable, but it has now become the way of the world. In order to elevate your business and take that next step to fuel your financial institution’s growth, you need to understand not only how to serve your customers where they are, but operate in a way that helps your employees through this digital revolution.
Make it Personal
Personalization is key in providing a relevant, 1:1 customer experience. Tailoring content to individual consumers based on their previous purchase history, browsing behavior, and actions taken on the website helps to offer a unique and intimate digital encounter with your brand. Personalization creates a more convenient experience, making the relationship easier on the user and minimizes calls and questions to your customer service team.
Web users are used to data personalization and customized experience – learning from other big brands like Amazon and Netflix that sharing data means a better, more carefree experience that gets them what they are searching for quicker. As digital banking interactions rise, consumers expect it to be a part of that experience – and become loyal to banks and credit unions that deliver.
Your digital personalization strategy is also not a “one and done” scenario — it takes continuous improvement to optimize your bank or credit union’s strategy for the future. As you develop personalized maturity that continues throughout the customer journey — and use first party data and consumer data to create this strategy — remember you don’t have to run there. It takes time, research, and understanding to implement a personalization strategy fit for your customers or members — and one you’re willing to work on time and time again. By following the data from your ideal customer’s digital journey, you can consistently offer the most relevant content to them at the perfect time and pivot as their behavioral responses change.
CX and EX: Expectations and the New Reality
How are branch managers, tellers and internal staff affected by implementing personalization? Well, as your customer gains access to a fully customizable experience, it’s important that your employees are provided with a smooth transition as well. Getting them to embrace changes in technology and your new organizational practices while optimizing your current platform’s capabilities can sound like quite the challenge.
As banks and credit unions work towards achieving digital banking maturity, it’s critical that it positively impacts the organization from the inside as well. While focusing on your customer experience, you must also put your employees in the foreground of your digital strategy work. In order to be continually evolving and be proactive in this digital space, your business’ processes and strategies will evolve — and fast.
To maintain employee satisfaction during this digitally transformative period, it’s essential to be open and collaborative in the process where you can. When advancing in your existing content management system (CMS) or introducing a new digital experience platform (DXP) that will become the heart of your customers’ personalized experience — and your employees’ role — it’s important to educate staff on these newly integrated tools and features.
Allowing existing branch managers and tellers to get acclimated to the adjustments and newfound resources will help eliminate the internal burnout. Employee productivity will increase when your financial institution can achieve a core understanding of the new procedures that will be put in place – while providing the developmental means your employees need to thrive.
Toolkits That Drive Positive Experience
Recognizing the value of combining the customer and employee experiences is the first step in driving digital success. Before working with a digital expert on a website audit and taking the necessary steps to achieve full digital maturity, it’s important to move with this cohesive vision at the forefront.
If you’re not looking at these core groups together — then you’re not working holistically. Customers and employees tend to be siloed and work independently, but investing in your employees is equally as important as the efforts being put into your members and the elevated digital experience. Oftentimes, a digital strategy starts with user and employee interviews to discover what they need when using their current tech stack.
As you evaluate your site, you may see opportunities for changes or additions to site content, a reconfiguring of the navigation through a new sitemap, or holes in the backend of your current platform that prevent employees from easily making changes that help website users. Reworking your systems — whether it’s moving to a DXP or just improving your current CMS — should be a seamless transition that takes all internal and external needs into consideration when providing upgraded, easy-to-use tools and resources.
Importance of a Modern Intranet and DXP
Modern intranet capabilities have come a long way from the clunky resource centers that just compiled a long list of hyperlinks and one-size-fits-all news announcements to more dynamic and personalized digital workspaces that literally transform the way employees work. With fully integrated apps and data that allow employees to work in a mobile-optimized and personalized environment, data from systems such as HRIS, CRM, CMS and more can be consolidated so that employees can interact with all the tools and information they need to do their job in one place.
These solutions allow for integration of information across multiple systems into a mobile-friendly personalized dashboard, similar to a single pane of glass. This experience combines data into one view – allowing your employees access to everything they need to serve customers or get the job done right at their fingertips.
Similarly, a DXP is a digital experience platform that enables the creation, management, and delivery of modern, personalized digital experiences across the full customer journey. It provides a suite of tools to build and nurture relationships in any channel and with any device. Most DXP’s easily integrate with core banking, commerce, customer relationship management solutions and more to provide one seamless experience to the end user.
What is a DXP?
DXPs — short for digital experience platform — allow banks to quickly deliver a personalized experience for customers.
Not all platforms are equal — it’s important to choose a CMS or DXP that aligns with your specific business needs. It is very easy to overpay for features that your organization would never use. Do your due diligence to find a solution that is a perfect fit for your needs.
Recognizing that digital experiences need to be custom for each member of your audience and using those same tools and insights to power your employee experience will drive your digital success. Ultimately, the easier the path to digital maturity is on your employees, the more natural the integration will feel for your customers.
Additional Resources:
- Small Steps to Big CX: An Agile Approach eBook
- Intrust Bank and Their Elevated CMS Platform
- Georgia United Credit Union’s Website Transformation