Exceeding customer expectations doesn’t just feel good — it’s a core driving force for your financial institution.
Too often, financial institutions are forced to apply fees and extract value from their customers in order to drive profits on a quarterly basis. However, this approach leads to poor customer experience, lowered enthusiasm for you financial institution’s brand, and an increased churn in your customer base coupled with lower profitability.
In reality, most executives and directors want to do right by their customers, and fortunately, there is a strong business case to do so. Consider the following when thinking about your customer experience and driving revenue for your financial institution.
Creating Advocates For Your Brand
One of the most powerful marketing tools your organization can have is a strong base of passionate brand advocates. These are the individuals who talk about your financial institution openly and enthusiastically with their friends and family members. By going to bat for your organization and speaking from a place of authenticity, your organization’s efforts to delight this customer have created a marketing tool that is both free and more powerful than any set of digital ads could ever be.
Admittedly, achieving passionate brand advocates sets a high benchmark. These individuals are ultimately putting their own reputation on the line by recommending you to those in their lives, cognizant of the fact that a bad experience could come back to them in the form of a disappointed acquaintance. However, by doing your work well and proving time and again to be a reliable partner, these enthusiastic customers won’t hesitate to sing praise about your organization’s value.
Creating Value For Your Client Base
Perhaps unsurprisingly, individuals who are more passionate about your brand are more willing to engage in new products and services, seek out your brand for new solutions, provide constructive feedback and overall serve as a more profitable customer.
In this way, executives and directors of financial institutions must always prioritize the long-term relationship over short-term profits. Decisions made to extract value without providing it in return, such as hidden fees as the most common example, slowly dissolve the trust between you and the customer, and result in less passion about your brand, higher attrition and less advocacy overall.
Fulfilling A Higher Purpose
In a business environment that largely focuses on profitability, it’s important for business leaders to remember that their organizations impact the financial lives of their customers, which impacts their wellbeing as human beings.
Profit-driven private organizations can continue to do so ethically when they know those profits are driven by a higher mission of improving customers’ lives. In particular, financial institutions have the privilege of working in the realm of personal finance, a deeply intimate and important facet of virtually every American’s life.
By honoring that relationship with the customer and creating value to create economic security and financial savvy, banks and credit unions are truly fulfilling their highest purpose.
