How to increase speed to value in CX investments

In a recent survey, nearly half of banking leaders agreed that customer journey simplification is a key goal. So, how does a bank accomplish this goals?

Here is a four-part approach to improving customer experience in a way that prioritizes speed to value – in other words, a process that empowers banks to confidently make customer experience changes that have a meaningful impact on the bottom line.

Research current customer experiences: Too often, when banks want to improve customer experience, they start with solutions: a mobile-first lending application, for example, or an online customer portal. The underlying assumption is that the bank knows its customers’ most significant problems, but that may not be the case.

Before investing in a customer experience solution, you must prioritize problems that your customers say are most important. Customers aren’t the only ones who will have insight. Customer-facing employees tend to hear the same complaints repeatedly and are excellent sources of insight, so ask them for input as part of deliberate user research aimed at discovering points of frustration. These represent your best opportunities to improve the customer experience.

Prioritize improvements based on impact: You’ll likely come out of your initial research with a list of opportunities to improve customer experience and, by extension, your brand’s value. To determine which to tackle first, prioritize those with the highest impact and lowest effort.

Customer service wait time is a common CX pain point in retail banking. Many banks have built slick customer-facing apps, thinking they could solve call-center backlogs via self-service. But there’s a subset of customers who prefer phone service and a subset of people who want human contact. The solution may be employee-facing technology that pulls customer data from a single source of truth, such as a customer data platform, to eliminate drag time as representatives toggle between multiple systems.

Making that change can take months or longer, but that doesn’t have to be the first or only gateway to CX improvement. The bank might launch a call center feature that offers an option to get a call back when a rep is ready rather than waiting on hold. That minimal investment allows for an immediate improvement to the customer experience while the bank works on longer-term improvements.

Make small, iterative updates: The traditional business case for new technology operates on a three- to four-year timeline, and you may only know whether the projected returns will match reality in year two or three.

Increasing speed to value is about shortening that time horizon, so you can make a relatively small change and measure its impacts within, say, six months – and then use the learnings to guide your next change. But boosting speed to value also requires avoiding investments that don’t improve (or perhaps even actively harm) the customer experience.

Banks can do this by modifying development processes to include user testing at all phases to generate feedback early and often about what actual users like and don’t like about proposed changes. In the call center example above, that might mean including employees in the selection, creation or customization of new software.

Consider a range of solutions: Not every CX improvement involves new technology. But when your bank needs it, including end users in building or buying is crucial to ensure speed to value.

If you opt for off-the-shelf software, include representatives from the call center by asking what features and functionalities they’d like. Bring them into demos; they’ll ask the most relevant questions. When you choose a solution with their input, onboarding will be easier because buy-in will be greater. If you opt to build custom software, ensure developers are testing mockups and prototypes with end users.

A hybrid approach to building new technology may help improve speed to value. In a hybrid approach, a bank works with a partner with a codebase containing the bulk of features needed and then the rest is custom-built to meet the institution’s specific needs.

The most significant benefit of prioritizing speed to value in CX investments is that banks take a more iterative, ongoing approach to making upgrades. This model aligns better with the rate of change that characterizes today’s technology.

Customer experience is not a destination; it’s a journey. Banks that recognize that reality and commit to investing in CX improvements over the long term will find the business benefits cascade throughout the organization because customers are happier and more loyal.

Young Pham is chief strategy officer at CI&T