How to Fix the CX Gap in Banking

Jim Marous (0:00)

If you want to close the customer experience gap in banking, start with how differently customers and executives see it. Half the customers in a global ServiceNow study said their biggest frustration with customer service is the lack of empathy. Yet only 23% of executives in the same study named this as the top frustration for their customers. So recently, I sat with the board and senior leaders of a credit union with over $10 billion in assets. I asked how many had spent time in the past year in a branch, the call center, or back office area. Watching the day unfold and hearing what members were saying, nobody raised a hand. These are good leaders who care deeply about their members, but it's easy to come to know your customers mostly through reports, and reports don't carry much of what a customer is actually feeling. The ServiceNow study surveyed more than 34,000 customers, service reps, and executives across eight industries. Bank and Financial Services was among the largest group of executives surveyed, so this research speaks to us. The stakes are real.

Nearly half the customers said they switched to a competitor over slow or poor service. Now, AI and customer service has made things faster, and 40% of customers said they've noticed. But faster hasn't fixed the empathy problem, which tells you that the gap sits in the human part of service. Let's start with the customer. Three out of four would rather try self-service first, when it's something simple like making a payment. Technology is exactly what they want.

When it's advice, a relationship, or something more complicated, they want a person, and they want to get there without starting over every time. Frustration builds when people get stuck.

A chat bot that can't finish the job, and no easy way to reach someone who can. One customer in this study said in a way I think every banker should hear. No one really listens or takes ownership of the issue. And a survey can only capture what people are willing to tell us. In a recent Banking Insight video, we talked about customers who are hurting financially right now.

Many of them never tell us at all. So we have to go looking for that need. Now most of us would say, well, that's what a customer contact center and our branches are for. We have people whose whole job is to listen. Here's what the ServiceNow study found about the people in those roles across all eight industries. Service reps spend only 45% of their time actually taking care of customers. The rest goes to administrative work, call notes, and chasing other teams for information. 80% of them have to log in to three to five different systems to solve a single customer problem. And only 39% said they've been given the tools and the training they need to deliver a great experience. Our people want to help, but we're asking them to deliver empathy with less than half of their day and a stack of screens. Fixing this is on us as leaders.

One company closed this gap with me personally. It cost them $7,000, but I think the investment paid off. I'll tell you how they did this in a couple minutes. The ServiceNow study also compared what customers said frustrate them with what executives believed frustrates their customers. On every frustration they compared, the executives came in with lower numbers. The widest gap sits on something every bank and credit union experiences every single day. Unclear explanation of processes and policies.

49% of customers said it frustrates them. Only 14% of executives identify that.

In our world, that's a fee notice, the disclosure, the hold on a deposit, or the letter that nobody can quite understand. And those are things our own teams write and approve. Marbue Brown, who led customer experience for Chase's Consumer Bank, gave me a simple test for this on the Banking Transformed podcast. Do you have policies your own employees want to distance themselves from? My own financial institution once processed a withdrawal before an internal transfer I'd made to cover it.

The employee I talked to said, I don't know, it just doesn't make any sense.

My own career helps explain why that scenario didn't surprise me. Almost 50 years ago, I was a management trainee and I had to balance my teller door to the penny every day. Then we went on rotation through every area of the bank, the loan area, the fraud area, the customer service area, and the branches. The whole point was to learn how my bank did things from their perspective. The rotation I went through was built to teach legacy procedures and it never included really sitting with a customer who had a problem. And as the leaders move up, more and more of what we talk about and know about the customer reaches us as survey scores and dashboards. Now, about that $7,000.