• Kristina Leach, Director, Global FSI Insights at Quantum Metric


• 07.12.2022 05:15 pm
#management

In August 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Consumer Duty rules comes into effect. That may sound like a long way away, but it will come fast and not having the right processes in place when the deadline hits could land Financial Institutions (FIs) with a hefty fine. 

Designed to fundamentally improve how the financial sector serves retail customers, the Duty sets “higher and clearer standards of consumer protection” and stipulates that customers’ needs are put first. 

The Duty itself is a welcome addition. Fundamentally, it has been created to protect customers from being misled or making poor financial decisions without being given all the appropriate information. Therefore, compliance should be viewed as an opportunity. It means FIs can review and enhance their products and services, to optimise each customer experience (CX) so consumers fully understand what they are buying. By being transparent, FIs can not only protect themselves from breaching compliance but also build customer engagement and trust – resulting in increased loyalty. 

While this sounds great in the long-term, the short-term implementation could feel like a mammoth task. To make it easier, I have broken down the process to help prioritise key areas for customer-centricity. 

There are several areas FIs can focus on when considering the needs, objectives and behaviours of consumers, like building a cross-channel understanding of customer behaviour all the way through developing journey analytics. With the right solution, FI’s can also gather evidence of compliance via session replay. 

Visibility of customer experience

Complying with the Duty (and remaining competitive), means that digital experiences are not "unclear or confusing", so optimising CX is essential. This is where journey analytics comes into play, allowing FIs to monitor and review customers' online experiences in order to understand how smooth (or not) their interactions are. Data-driven journey analytics provide insights into customers' activities, errors, frustrations, and behaviours, helping firms retrace customers' journeys and empathise with them. By pinpointing and viewing the moment of derailment, it's possible to identify friction points and usability issues.

By leveraging real-time behavioural KPI alerts and friction monitoring, FIs have the opportunity to rescue customers in the moment, turning a potentially negative experience into one that delights the customer. Depending on the situation, organisations can send personalised offers, surveys to better understand the problem, email updates on improvements, or chat invitations in context of the challenge the customer is experiencing. 

It’s also possible to track and respond to customers' concerns by collecting voice of the customer (VoC) feedback. However, while VoC is instrumental in understanding consumer sentiment and the experiences that are driving it, VoC does not provide insight into a problem's size and scope. Augmenting VoC with issue quantification provides a more comprehensive understanding of what is happening. Being able to see how many customers have experienced the same issue and what behaviour it drove (e.g. abandonment, calling the contact centre, etc), helps FIs prioritise fixes by focusing on the most significant challenges, be it rage clicks, JavaScript errors, slow API calls or design issues. 

Creating an omnichannel understanding of customer behaviour 

Customers are increasingly interacting with financial services providers through multiple channels. A process may be started online and then completed by calling the contact centre, particularly if friction arises. According to Quantum Metric’s retail banking survey, 52% of UK respondents prefer leveraging several channels. 

Therefore, it’s critical that FIs deliver seamless and consistent experiences across channels. By arming customer support employees with real-time visibility into the digital experiences people are having, they can serve customers more quickly and efficiently.  However, if a customer support employee is not able to resolve the concern during the initial call, being able to escalate the issue to engineering with diagnostic information eliminates the challenge of recreating the problem prior to fixing it. This drives faster time to resolution, resulting in higher customer satisfaction as well as improved efficiency.

Demonstrating compliance with session replays 

Aside from delivering good customer outcomes, FIs must also prove that they're meeting compliance regulations. This means demonstrating that the appropriate information was collected from and provided to customers, enabling them to make informed decisions. 

This can be achieved with session replay. To ensure compliance, FIs must capture and store 100% of user sessions. Long-term storage of session replays will therefore become critical, as will linking session replays directly to contact centre calls, giving regulators in-depth accounts of actions firms took. This data-driven approach provides a wealth of customer insights that can improve CX and help protect the customer while ensuring FCA compliance is built in from the outset. 

Satisfying the new FCA Consumer Duty regulations is no small task. By optimising CX, delivering real-time support, and bridging the gap between online and phone channels, FI firms can achieve regulatory compliance and become truly customer-centric.