Top 4 Customer Experience Trends for Financial Services to Expect in 2022

It’s difficult to keep abreast with the latest customer experience trends at the best of times. 2021 has taken this to another level. Customer expectations, physical restrictions, and heightened demands – all of these factors have significantly shifted the CX landscape, and financial services has been in the middle of it all.

Some financial services have taken actions to enhance CX and increase customer engagement, such as Cabrillo Credit Union and Motor City Community Credit Union. Their successful digital transformation has relied on the adoption of live chat and AI chatbots. Cabrillo decreased average wait time from 50 seconds (on phone) to 15 seconds (on live chat), and Motor City Community Credit Union are achieving a 4.6/5 customer satisfaction score.

As we look ahead, 2022 promises even more change for the financial services industry. To help cut through the noise, we’ve looked at emerging data and expert opinions to predict the financial services CX trends that we expect to see in 2022.

1. Omnichannel expectation 

For the past few years, the need for digital communication has grown across industries as companies understand the need to meet customers on their terms. In 2022, financial services will step up to the mark and catch up with other industries, investing in technology that allows them to offer customers the array of digital channels they have to expect – and omnichannel will be at the core of this. 

With an omnichannel customer engagement platform, customers can connect with their financial services on the channel that best suits them at any given time; be it via live chat, email, SMS, or mobile app.  

One of the greatest challenges for financial services organizations has been juggling the need to push innovation while maintaining support for trusted and secure technologies. Writing for Financial IT, Hans Tesselaar states that, “In 2022, banks will have to focus on overcoming the extensive use of legacy technology which prevents them from bringing new services to life.”   

According to a recent survey, 50 % of banking consumers want a seamless mix of physical and digital services during their buying journey. However, despite the importance of omnichannel marketing, 94% of banking firms aren’t delivering personalized experiences.  

Omnichannel platforms allow organizations to create new experiences for customers by integrating all their digital channels in one place. For customers, this integration provides a seamless and excellent experience. For financial services organizations, omnichannel platforms allow support agents to be everywhere that their customers are. With this unified system in place, agents have a 360-degree view of customers and their issues, empowering them to provide the support that is not only more accurate and helpful but also more efficient.  

2. Chatbot domination  

In 2022, chatbots will become a driving factor in improving customer experience. While bots are seeing use in financial services, many organizations are still hesitant to embrace them. This will all change in 2022 as more organizations make the leap to AI. 

Year over year, chatbot use has increased significantly as technology and AI improvements have been made. Between 2018 and 2020, the adoption of chatbots increased by 67%.  

According to a study from Juniper Research, by 2023 chatbots will:  

– Provide operational cost savings of $7.3 billion globally in banking

– Save banks 862 million working hours 

– Account for 79% of successful interactions in mobile banking apps 

Looking at the technology driving customer service trends in financial services, it’s not hard to understand why this shift to chatbots has happened. As AI has improved, chatbots have increasingly handled interactions without any human intervention. Chatbots can now handle up to 80% of all customer inquiries, enabling customer service teams to offer 24/7 support at a fraction of the cost. 

Chatbots provide service that is fast and accurate – but that shouldn’t happen at the expense of the human touch. Agents and chatbots each have complementary roles to play. Just as agents benefit from chatbots providing additional capacity through automation, chatbots work best when agents are available to handle the most complex interactions. 

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3. Technology investment boom 

In 2020, COVID-19 pushed forward the adoption of digitized services in ways that nobody could have predicted. Following the onset of the pandemic, McKinsey found that digitization of customer and supply-chain interactions was accelerated by three to four years. This trend doesn’t appear to be slowing at all, with Forrester predicting in a new report, that banks will spend big on technology in 2022. 

All this spending on technology will have major implications for customer experience. Forbes contributor Bernard Marr notes channel digitization and expansion as his first of 8 consumer and customer experience trends in 2022. Marr describes the sea change toward businesses recognizing digital channels as the primary way that consumers now choose to connect:  

“…in the past, this digitization journey has generally treated digital channels – websites, social media, etc. – as add-ons. Now, the gear has shifted completely, and customers increasingly come to a business via a digital channel. Digital comes first, in other words.” 

4. Hyper personalization demand 

As financial services organizations have sought out new ways to connect with customers, it has become obvious that the move toward personalized service is far more than a passing fad. Among the main arguments for this shift to a customer-centric business is the need for organizations to differentiate themselves from the competition. 

In their report The Future of Retail Banking – The Hyper-Personalisation Imperative, Deloitte outlines why banks must adopt hyper-personalization:  

“CX is predicted to overtake price and product as a firm’s brand differentiator. Rapidly-evolving CX means that customers want interactions with their bank to be as sophisticated, immediate, and personalized as their experiences with other industries. As a result, financial services customers are willing to share data as long as they receive offerings tailored to their needs. Yet, 94% of banks cannot deliver on this hyper-personalization potential.”  

These predictions are backed by the current data, with a 2021 Capco study finding that 72% of customers rate personalization as “highly important” in financial services today. Thankfully, digital technologies are presenting new opportunities for financial services organizations to engage with customers in 2022.  

With the adoption of live chat, financial services organizations can provide more personalized and helpful support than traditional phone support. With all previous chat history data at hand, support agents can focus on resolving customer issues than rather data collection. With CRM integration, live chat also enables financial services organizations to pull additional CRM data to the agent console – from loan history to mortgage status.  

Mobile applications collect a massive amount of data — data that doesn’t do organizations or their customers any good when it’s left untouched. Data analytics platforms and machine learning algorithms can help organizations to extract valuable information from this customer data, which can then be leveraged to develop new products, optimize existing processes, better empower customers, and improve the overall customer experience. 

Omnichannel customer engagement platforms help financial services organizations take this level of personalization even further. With every channel and its data connected, agents have even more client data at their fingertips to provide extremely personalized support. Within omnichannel platforms, you can also automatically route clients to specific agents. For example, if a client starts a live chat, this chat can be automatically directed to their account manager. 

Wrap-up 

If you’re interested in learning more about how your organization can improve customer experience in 2022 with digital customer engagement technology, book a demo with Comm100 today.