When we think of our own financial institution, we think of active service, the inner-workings of our digital platform, and the countless ways we work to engage with customers and improve their experiences with our organization.
However, the reality for customers can be quite different. Customers might not think of your financial institution as being as top-of-mind as we might like. This is okay! Even though we want customers to actively think about our brands and organizations, the reality is that we can be more powerful as regular, invisible helpers in their everyday lives.
Instead of being an entity your customer thinks about, which requires energy, what if your organization strived to be a behind-the-scenes tool that helps them facilitate everything with ease? In this way, your organization can get out of the way, tangibly improve your customers’ lives and better integrate yourself with their day-to-day activities. Consider the following ways you can become an invisible ally.
Removing Friction In Customers’ Lives
Find ways as an organization to make your customers’ financial lives easier, creating seamless interactions at the point of purchase. Contactless payment systems, automated transactions, and quick approval of transactions to third party vendors are all useful ways you can streamline their activities. In situations like these, having your customers not think about your organization should be the goal. If they don’t, it means their activities that utilize your services are working perfectly.
Automating Budgeting through FinTech
Your organization should work closely with a FinTech partner to provide customers with a sophisticated, no-hassle budgeting tool that connects directly to their transaction history. Importantly, make sure your organization has infrastructure in place to solicit feedback about the tool and help your FinTech partner continuously modify and improve.
One of the most important elements of an online budgeting tool is its ability to simply work without a lot of manual input. How well does it automatically categorize transactions? Does it make note of how the user categorized a previous transaction? Asking questions like these and coming up with useful solutions can ensure your customers spend more time getting use out of your budgeting tools, and less time trying to understand them.
Streamlining New Offers
When a customer wants to engage with your organization through a new product or service, you need to be as ready as possible to make that process easy and rewarding. Whether it be opening up a new account, looking for help about a budgeting tool or looking to apply for a new loan, make sure your organization can do as much work on the back end as possible to take the load off of their plates.
In particular, actions like auto-populating their personal information, pre-approving them for loans, and giving your universal banker easy access to their finances and past interactions with your organization can all lead to an enhanced experience that values their time and helps your maximize the value you provide.
