Financial services investment in customer experience questioned as annual complaints rise

 The total number of complaints against financial service institutions has increased, despite investment in customer service processes. Complaints data from Financial Ombudsman Service revealed a rise from 1,456,396 between 2017/2018 up from 1,394,379 the year before.

Poor customer experience costs the banking and financial services industry £5.81 billion in 2017. Businesses are mistakenly focusing on optimising their business operations without the customer in mind, according to Business Process Management Company Signavio.

Improving customer experience is helping traditional players regain their lead position against a backdrop of mounting competition from agile challengers.

Dr Gero Decker, CEO & Founder of Signavio, comments: “Focusing on saving time and resources to become more efficient is an outdated way of looking at customer experience.  Customer journeys are proving to be a great way of shifting the mindset when it comes to back-end processes. Although it is a business problem and not a customer issue, businesses need to align their processes with customer experience by looking at them from the eyes of the customer, asking how  these processes will help to achieve a better experience for the customer.

“Today, businesses need to change their way of thinking and connect the dots between customer experience and business operations by mapping out the customer journey and aligning it with internal processes. This shifts the thinking from internal efficiency to external, customer-driven effectiveness.”

Gero continues: “Businesses need to empower every human agent to be able to derive customer insights from different touch points of the customer journey. Customer data is essential for effective complaint handling not only to appropriately calculate the right response in terms of reimbursement, but also to fulfil your regulatory obligations.

“Setting up processes to log and capture all complaints, classifying them and addressing their root cause gives all business users full visibility. This can help all business users create a positive cycle where data is used to improve customer satisfaction and speed up resolution.”