Open banking offers both financial services and financial experiences. The latter makes a very important contribution to the former.
In this blog, we’ll discuss open banking customer experience and how it applies to business working in the open banking ecosystem.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience (CX) refers to the overall experience customers have with a brand; its representatives, products or services, and more. It covers everything from initial exposure to a brand’s marketing to the completion of service or product delivery and after-sales.
Good customer experience fosters customer satisfaction. And this makes customers more likely to make repeat purchases and to recommend a brand to others.
What’s the difference between customer experience and customer satisfaction?
Customer experience is a concept that refers to all interactions a customer has with a company and its products or services as a holistic whole. It is basically a summary of their whole journey.
Customer satisfaction (CS) is a measure of a customer’s contentment with a specific interaction or transaction. It’s more like a metric for a single event than a summary of an entire journey.
Both terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Whilst this is technically incorrect, it is usually relatively easy to decipher from the context which term is meant.
What’s the difference between customer experience and user experience?
Customer experience refers to everything around a customer gaining access to a product or service. User experience is about the experience within that product or service once accessed.
This means that customer experience is about the customers’ experience with a brand or company. This covers a range of different interactions, which are categorised as positive or negative from an emotional point of view.
User experience, on the other hand, is about the customers’ direct interactions with a product or service. This is primarily focused on functionality and usability.
Customer experience is usually significantly shorter in duration than user experience.
In some cases, both customer experience and user experience can be completely out of sync. For example, a company might provide a product with great user experience but poor customer experience. Or vice versa.
Customer experience and open banking
Open banking offers a secure way for customers to share their financial data with organisations other than their traditional banks.
Modern banking platforms are now required to enable third-party financial service providers to access banking data using APIs. And many legacy banks are now implementing API compatibility as part of a digital transformation strategy.
These enable friction-free consent authorisation and secure banking data sharing, which should ensure customers’ experiences are free from barriers to adoption.
As open banking solutions become more popular, gaining consumer trust is getting easier. Sign-ups to services are relatively straightforward. However, there are two important caveats to add to this:
- It’s also easier for other third-party providers
- It doesn’t guarantee customers’ patience, too
User experience (UX) for open banking is also an important consideration. If the platform provided isn’t easy and intuitive to use, many will simply abandon it - this will mean all efforts to provide superior customer experience would have been wasted.
How to improve customer experience for open banking
There are several ways to improve customer experience for open banking services and solutions. These range from general principles to specific tactics.
1. Understand your customers
Knowing your customers’ needs, likes and dislikes enables you to improve their experience. Direct feedback, whether from surveys, reviews, or direct communications is a great starting point for discovering this. You can also look at customer data more broadly to gain useful insights. Metrics around engagement, loyalty, cart abandonment, and repeat purchases might indicate strong and weak points in the customer journey.
2. Personalise interactions
Tailoring communication and offerings to individual customers can enhance their engagement and customer loyalty. This can cover everything from what email marketing they receive to how frequently they are contacted by sales.
This does not have to conflict with reinforcing your brand identity. You can still maintain consistent brand touch points, such as communication channels and styles.
3. Maintain high customer responsiveness
Customer responsiveness refers to how quickly and effectively businesses respond to customers. According to one survey, 66% of customers expected a response from businesses within 5 minutes.
So, responding to queries and complaints very quickly matters. It can even extend to reviews: responding to both positive and negative reviews quickly and well demonstrates to others how responsive your company is.
4. Streamline processes
Principles from user experience can be applied to your interactions and financial transactions with customers.
Making your financial products and lines of communication easy to access will provide customers with a more seamless experience.
You should also ensure that you have the right internal processes to manage customer interactions.
5. Focus on trust
All financial institutions depend on customer trust. Without it, customers will avoid them.
Whether it’s related to ensure data privacy or providing strong customer authentication (SCA), taking measures to prevent fraud are essential. So too is making this clear within apps and in marketing and other resources.
Yapily’s open banking solutions
Now that open banking journeys are mobile-friendly and fit for almost any retail, business end-user or consumer, it’s time to explore just how quickly you can migrate your bank feeds or payments channels.
With Yapily, you can access all customer financial data from banks offering open banking services via a single API. No interference, just seamless middleware configuration for businesses big and small! 🚀
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Conclusion
Customer experience encompasses customers’ overall interactions with a business and access to its products or services. It has a significant impact on a businesses’ chances of success.
It differs from customer satisfaction, which measures contentment with specific interactions, and from user experience focuses on customers’ direct interactions within a product or service.
In open banking, positive customer experience requires adherence to several key principles. These include:
- Understanding customers’ needs through feedback and data analysis
- Personalising interactions
- Being highly responsive
- Streamlining processes
- Emphasising trust building trust through security measures and clear communication
By focusing on these principles, businesses are more likely to have customers make repeat purchases and to recommend a brand to others.
