Driving High Performance Customer Experiences in Financial Services

Last week PowerObjects hosted a Financial Services Customer Experience Symposium in New York City. The goal of the event was to bring together thought leaders to present and discuss the importance of customer service and the ways in which financial services organizations can improve customer experiences.

The keynote speaker at the event was Lior Arussy the President of Strativity Group. Lior is one of the world’s authorities on customer experience, customer centricity and transformation. His organization’s strategic framework converts organizations from product- to customer-centricity, drawn from his work with some of the world’s leading brands.

Lior addressed the importance of brands differentiating through providing exceptional value and high performance. By wowing customers, you can create an exceptional experience that becomes a memory – which adds to the customer’s journey. Through the principals of exceptional experiences: memorable, authentic, personalized, knowledgeable, easy and timely, your brand can elevate and develop a long-lasting life journey with a customer. He emphasized how your organization should never be complacent or too confident; you should always look for what’s next and transform your business to stay ahead of the pack.

Lior also discussed the barriers to successful change such as poor communication, poor leadership, lack of understanding of purpose of change, lack of buy-in, and how organizations can strive to overcome these challenges. One key to changing an organization from product to customer-centric, is changing your purpose from performance (or task completion) to a mission (exceeding expectations).

The event also featured speakers from Forrester Research: Kate Leggett, VP and Principal Analyst, and Alyson Clarke, Principal Analyst. Kate is a leading expert on customer relationship management (CRM) and customer service strategies, maturity, bench-marking, governance, and ROI. Alyson specializes in digital and non-digital channel strategy and innovation in the sales, service, and customer experience of financial services.

Kate and Alyson addressed the trends that are shaping the future of financial services and how empowered customers have given rise to an “age of the customer.” Alyson discussed how customer expectations have evolved and that customers are seeking immediate information and service from any device at any time.

A key concept covered was the importance of personalizing customer interactions and how those moments affect the entire customer life-cycle. Customers expect simple, fast, personalized, and secure service. Alyson stressed that organizations shouldn’t rely on a single data point and assume they know everything about a customer – which creates artificial interactions that hurt brand loyalty. Organizations need to combine systems of insight and quality data to provide personalized experiences across many different channels – whether that’s through video, bots, a mobile app, content, or messaging. Financial services organizations need to become digital businesses that focus on creating digital assets to deliver new sources of value, empower customers to improve their financial situations, and increase operational agility.

Kate discussed how many financial institutions will struggle to meet these evolving customer expectations and that’s where CRM comes in as a solution to help organizations manage customer engagement and data across touchpoints and channels. She emphasized that organizations need to invest in foundational initiatives and take advantage of emerging tech in order to stay innovative.

The last speaker of the event was PowerObjects customer, Allan Measor, Director of Client Experience at Moneris. Moneris is Canada’s largest provider of payment processing solutions offering credit, debit, wireless, and online payment services. Allan spoke to the Moneris customer experience journey and how they have implemented CRM for Microsoft Dynamics 365 to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers. He shared Moneris process in selecting CRM and PowerObjects as a partner to help create an effective solution to transform their business.

The event was great opportunity for financial services organizations to hear from experts and thought leaders on the importance of customer experience as a brand differentiator and how good customer service drives revenue, customer loyalty, upsell/cross-sell opportunities, and increases margins.

As customer expectations continue to rise, how can your brand create a customer experience that differentiates you from the competition? Learn more about future PowerObjects events here. Want more information on delivering great customer experiences? Read our white paper: Improving the Customer Experience Through Service Innovation or check out our high performance service page here.

Happy CRM’ing!