While financial institutions are constantly working to improve their processes and fine tune the customer experience, the reality is that they can still be wildly imperfect. This harsh reality is especially difficult to accept when executives and directors work tirelessly to analyze every pain point, improve every point of contact, and regularly roll out new initiatives and offerings to improve the customer experience.
The regular rolling out of new initiatives should give us solace in this imperfection; after all, how can something be perfect if it is constantly changing and growing?
As a leader for your organization, you need to be agile enough to address these imperfections as they come up, and provide quick solutions. An obstacle a customer encounters doesn’t become a problem until your organization fails to resolve it. Consider the following when thinking about quick, efficient problem resolution for your customers moving forward.
Provide an Avenue for Feedback
One of the best things you can do to address customer problems is to offer them a place to give feedback. If something isn’t working for an individual customer, whether it be a bug in your mobile banking app or an issue they encounter at a branch, there is a high likelihood that other customers are experiencing the same thing.
As much as we hate to hear critical feedback, we should be grateful to those customers who speak up. These individuals are helping us correct our issues and directing our attention to pertinent problems free of charge. Encourage them to speak up and help your organization improve.
Provide an Internal Communication Chain
Hopefully your organization has some way for customers to communicate with a human directly. Typically, a chat feature on your website or mobile app helps facilitate this. If this is in place, does the conversation stop once the chat ends, or does your organization have the infrastructure and communication chain to address systemic problems articulated at an individual level?
Ideally, your organization or a partner should be able to aggregate feedback, classify it into topics, and prioritize the most pressing issues customers are identifying for you. Make sure the individual universal bankers, chat support specialists and other feedback sources have a structure to not just collect customer feedback, but regularly act on it.
Enable Your Universal Bankers
Ultimately, customer issues arise due to your organization missing an issue or failing to anticipate a problem. This failure is simply a part of business, and only becomes greater issue when you aren’t able to rectify the problem.
Sometimes, these problems aren’t inherently straightforward. For example, a bug in your mobile app could take weeks to correct. In the meantime, if it’s preventing customers from performing an important task, their overall experience will continue to suffer.
Make sure your staff is empowered to paper over the cracks in the meantime. Give them the tools, access and training necessary to fix problems like these themselves in the short term while a long-term solution is developed. The timeliness of which you can resolve issues like these will resonate with your customers and leave them feeling happy you could fix their problem as quickly as possible.
