Banks Can Pop Up Over and Over Again, Or You Can Show Up When It Matters
By Nicole Volpe, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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For most banking professionals, it’s a truth seldom acknowledged: Account holders have been trained to ignore your communications.
On any given day, an accountholder, looking to accomplish a simple task online, may instead encounter a series of cascading notifications: a promotional offer for a new credit card, a scheduled system maintenance alert, an invitation to refinance their mortgage, and somewhere buried in the mix — a potential fraud notification.
Which message gets attention? Which gets ignored? Which message needs attention, but doesn’t get it?
The answer, according to new research from CSG, is troubling: Your accountholders likely have learned to tune out your messages. All of them. Some 70% of consumers say brands, across industries, send so many messages that recipients simply don’t care what they’re trying to say anymore. Worse, 59% admit they’ve deleted critical messages (think: bills, data breaches, money-saving opportunities) because they mistook them for marketing noise.
It’s a particularly painful self-inflicted wound for banks. Entrusted with key aspects of their account holders’ well-being, financial institutions don’t have to manufacture relevance and immediacy to create engagement. Yet they routinely squander this advantage with marketing and messaging that adds to the overwhelm rather than cutting through it.
In its 2026 State of the Customer Experience Report, CSG — a customer engagement, revenue management, and payments solutions provider — explored the consequences of such excessive contact. Some 65% of consumers are left worrying they’ll miss important messages because they’ve learned to ignore communications altogether, and 34% have stopped doing business with offending brands.
The path forward requires clarity and focus. Rather than trying to reach accountholders everywhere, all the time, with everything, more institutions are instead identifying and obsessing over the moments that matter most. In a conversation with The Financial Brand, CSG executives Richard Ullenius and Brandon Sailors unpacked how focusing on such critical moments can enable financial institutions to distinguish themselves in a noisy and crowded marketplace. Here are five such moments where banks can build lasting loyalty.
Critical Moment 1. Onboarding and Service Activation
Consider the mindset of a customer who has decided to do business with your institution. You’ve invested in finding and engaging them. And likewise they’ve invested in finding and engaging you. After weighing a range of options with different degrees of depth and analysis (including taking no action at all), they’re finally ready to get started. They know they’ll have to provide a significant measure of personal information. In return, they expect you to deliver. Will the account be activated seamlessly? Will the application process inspire a sense of trust and safety? Will they know what’s happening at each step, or will they be left wondering whether their input disappeared into a black hole?
For banks that continue to compete with digital-first competitors (whose business models are founded on super-simple onboarding processes), the bar for success is high. To succeed in the onboarding moment demands operational excellence and communications precision. “If banks can deliver services faster, without sacrificing trust, and do it with greater predictability, transparency, and reliability, they win,” said Ullenius, Vice President, Global Banking & Financial Services for CSG.
This means sending proactive updates at every stage (application received, documents under review, approval pending, account active); making it easy to complete next steps or schedule an appointment; and ensuring the applicant receives the same status update whether they check online, call the contact center, or meet with their relationship manager at a branch.
Banks that master onboarding set the tone for the entire relationship and set themselves up for long-term success. Customers should arrive at the other end of the process ready to deepen their engagement rather than question whether they made the right choice.
Critical Moment 2. Billing and Payment
When an accountholder or borrower receives a bill and makes a payment, they’re in a heightened state of attention and vulnerability. At this moment, they experience their financial life as a two-way street: money comes in, and money goes out. What’s more, their bank is getting paid for the privilege of keeping and disbursing their funds … or enabling them to own their car or home. They recognize that if they fail to meet this obligation, the bank will impose fees and interest will accrue. They may be fearful of paying the wrong amount. They want control.
Is there any doubt that the user experience must be clear and definitive? Yet too often, payment-related reminders are buried among other messaging, or customers receive contradictory or unclear information. Statements require multiple clicks to find and review. Sailors, who is CSG’s Vice President, CX Strategic Accounts, describes how easily the relationship can be undermined: “If you send them a note to make a payment, and then you send them an email the next day that says, hey, you have to make a payment and they’ve already made it, you’ve kind of already lost some trust there.” Even the accountholder who has set up autopay wants confirmation that everything is as it should be.
CSG’s research found that 43% of consumers identify payments as a service task they’re comfortable with artificial intelligence handling. That comfort level improves when the AI experience is seamless and trustworthy. This means suppressing unnecessary messages when action has already been taken, proactively alerting customers before late fees hit, and making the payment process as frictionless as possible.
Critical Moment 3. Customer Service
Poor customer service (45%) and difficulty resolving issues (44%) are the top-cited reasons customers leave their banks, according to CSG’s research. That’s not surprising: When a customer reaches out for help — whether through a chatbot, phone call, or branch visit — they’re already in a state of friction because something isn’t working or doesn’t make sense. This moment can epitomize the entire relationship: will the bank make it easy, or add to the frustration?
AI can be part of the solution, bringing speed and precision to automated problem resolution. But it also risks sending the wrong message. In fact, only 41% of consumers believe chatbots are more effective than human agents at resolving issues. Fifty-six percent remain uncomfortable letting AI take actions on their behalf (i.e., agentic AI). And a full 62% say a factor that increases their confidence in automated support is a smooth transfer to a human agent when needed.
The problem is, many institutions approach the customer service moment with a technology-first rather than an outcome-first mindset, deploying AI agents without considering the path to first-contact resolution or a smooth handoff to a human rep. Banks must think differently about AI, Ullenius said: “AI must support, not sabotage, these moments.”
Inside-facing AI applications can enable service reps to provide callers with context, suggest solutions, and eliminate the dreaded “let me transfer you” pivot (which can feel like a bureaucratic runaround even when it isn’t). Sailors emphasized the point: “You have to understand in real time what the customer is doing and have that real-time context as it drives the journey and how you respond.” A service team that can speak fluently and accurately about a caller’s previous contacts and current account status immediately earns confidence.
Critical Moment 4. Security and Fraud
It does not qualify as news to say that accountholders care deeply about interactions involving fraud and data breach prevention and response. A suspicious transaction notification or security breach warning demands immediate attention and definitive resolution. Yet these critical messages often get lost in the noise, too.
When a customer misses a fraud alert, for whatever reason, it’s an institutional failure. Sailors said banks today are held to an Amazon-like standard: “If I order something, I’m going to get an immediate confirmation; when something ships, I will proactively be notified; same thing, when something has shown up at my door.”
Said Sailors: “Why wouldn’t a bank provide the same sort of experiences for fraud notifications?” For financial institutions, the security moment offers an opportunity to differentiate through personalized attention: combining intelligent detection with unmistakably clear, urgent communication that cuts through the clutter. This means reserving certain channels (like phone calls or SMS) for high-priority alerts, using plain language that explains exactly what happened and what the next steps are, and ensuring customers can reach a human immediately for verification. Banks that treat security communications as sacred (never diluting them with cross-sell attempts or burying them among routine notices) will own this critical moment.
Critical Moment 5. Retention and Growth
While the first four critical moments may have been “moments of truth” primarily in the accountholder’s eyes, an accountholder’s decision to add a second product or service is a clear moment of truth for the institution. This is the moment when they show willingness to expand their relationship, and set the institution up for a long-term profitable relationship.
Such moments are often triggered by a life event. And they can come and go without an institution noticing. The accountholder may need a mortgage or an insurance policy. They may be looking for a place to put a bonus payment or a small inheritance. Meanwhile, your competitors’ messaging has been in the mix all along, part of the information overload. Does your existing relationship give you a leg-up? Or are mishandled critical moments undermining their willingness to go with the provider they know?
Perhaps more importantly, has your own marketing approach been helping or hurting your cause? Sailors described a situation in which an institution has continued pushing cross-sell campaigns to an accountholder, even as the individual is trying to navigate other critical moments. “If a person is trying to solve an issue with one of my business units, but they keep getting a ton of marketing messages from my other business units, aren’t I actually undermining both efforts?”
The retention and growth moment requires banks to flip their approach from volume to relevance. This is where relationship banking can truly shine, but only if communication reflects genuine understanding of where each customer is in their financial journey. CSG’s data supports this: 51% of consumers say messages feel relevant when they’re tailored to recent activity, and 60% stay subscribed to communications specifically for exclusive deals and discounts that matter to them.
Banks that strike the right balance — helping when customers need it, stepping back when they don’t — will be the ones that turn satisfied customers into lifelong advocates. This includes knowing when to suspend promotional messages, recognizing life-stage signals, and ensuring growth conversations feel like helpful advice rather than opportunistic sales pitches.
