The world of banking has gone mobile, as more and more consumers are completing transactions via mobile devices. With adoption rates highest among younger age groups, we can expect this trend to grow further. With this shift, the banking industry is trying to evolve to provide an excellent customer experience to customers they never see. Here are some key insights on improving the customer experience in the mobile-banking world.
Constant Accessibility
Banks are often known for their extremely limited hours of operation. This should not be the case with your app or online access. Whether your organization has its own app or you simply make client banking docs available online, it’s important that your customers are always able to access those documents whenever and wherever they need to do so.
This means a few different things for your institution. First, it means having a user-friendly app or sharing portal. If you’re a smaller bank or credit union, designing your own app may not be feasible. However, there are safe, secure, and user-friendly sharing portals out there that work well for smaller institutions. These applications make it easy to provide your banking customers with access to account statements, transaction receipts, loan applications, and more.
It also means that the application you use needs to have a high percentage of up time. The last thing your customers want to deal with is a website or app that is constantly having issues downloading their documents. If you have your own app, you’ll have to manage the maintenance and ensure up times on your own. If you choose to use a third-party app, choose one that is reliable and has guaranteed up times for your customers.
Exceptional Security
Security and reputation are reported among the most important attributes a bank can have. This makes perfect sense, considering the fact that you are handling extremely sensitive information regarding your customers’ finances—they want to ensure that you have the ability to protect that data, as well as a proven track record of doing just that.
Customers rely heavily on being able to trust you and your organization, whether they’re making a deposit, filling out a loan application, or speaking to a financial advisor. The surest way to breach this trust is to have a breach in your security.
From the physical security at your institution’s location, to the digital security surrounding your customers’ electronic data, your security measures need to be at the highest level at all times. Since we’re talking about mobile banking in this guide, we’ll focus on digital security over physical security. First and foremost, storing documents and data electronically provides you with opportunities for much higher levels of security than physical document storage. Access can be more easily restricted, data can be encrypted, and documents are never lost or misplaced.
Some institutions feel that there is a conflict between high security and high levels of accessibility. While this may be true on the surface, these two factors can easily be balanced out. If you’re using secure sharing portals and encrypted document storage, you can still offer the highest levels of security while making documents and data accessible to your clients.
Investing in Your Clients
While you may think that the world of mobile banking just makes your institution a faceless processor of transactions, that’s not what your customers want from you at all. In fact, without the face-to-face interaction with your tellers and advisors, it becomes even more important for your institution to prove that you are invested in your clients.
Cheryl Flink, chief strategy officer for Market Force Information, said that, while most big banks excelled at the basics like handling transactions, “they’re missing the mark in areas that enable them to build trust. For instance, most consumers don’t see their banks investing in their financial well-being, customizing services to their needs or helping them with money-saving tools.”
Essentially, customers want to know that you actually care about their financial future. This means offering them tools that help them manage their money better, like retirement planning tools, budget calculators, and so on. Though offering these tools via your app or website may seem like once again you’re just being a faceless institution, it has just the opposite effect on your customers; it shows them that you are invested in them as individuals, and strengthens the trust they have in you.
Easy to Speak to a Person
Though mobile banking is the new way of conducting most transactions, it can’t completely replace the value of physical bank locations and human representatives. No matter how much technology your institution has, you must still make it easy and convenient for your customers to speak to a human when they need to.
Being able to speak to an advisor increases customer satisfaction by an average of 6%, and makes them 7% more likely to recommend your organization. Increased satisfaction also means increased loyalty, so your customers will be much less likely to switch banks if they are able to speak with an advisor when needed. In fact, one of the primary reasons customers give for wanting to switch banks is their bank’s level of service. So even in the digital world, human touch is essential to success in the banking industry.
Mobile banking has forced many financial institutions to reexamine the way they do business, especially in regards to how they interact with their clients. While customer experience used to rely solely on their interactions with your staff, it now relies on their interactions with your technology. This means that your apps, website, and portals must be secure and easy to use—and of course, your staff should be there when your customers need them.
About the Author:
Jesse Wood is the CEO of document management software vendor, eFileCabinet. Founded in 2001, eFileCabinet, Inc. began as a cutting-edge tool to digitally store records in accounting firms. As it grew in popularity, eFileCabinet developed into a full-fledged electronic document management solution designed to help organizations automate redundant processes, ensure security, and solve common office problems.