Reimagine the customer experience in banking

Despite ten years of heavy investment in technology, aimed at driving change in financial services, few banks, insurers, or payments and wealth management companies have managed to achieve any significant transformation of their operating models. As a result, the customer experience (CX) stands still, or at least, fails to keep up with the demands of today’s consumer.

Since customer experience (CX) is fundamentally an IT issue, tomorrow’s CX answers are today’s IT questions. And with several macro-trends in customer and employee experience now putting pressure on financial services organisations to accelerate change, firms must find new ways to design, plan, and execute technology-driven transformation, if they’re to thrive over the next decade.

ESG, Fintech Ecosystems, Cloud Acceleration, Hyper-Automation, Operational Resilience, Customer Journey Digitization, Future of Work, and Digital Compliance are all trends affecting today’s financial services organisations.

During the 2022 CXExchange BFSI, I hosted a session with several CX leads to explore these trends and to look at how ServiceNow’s unique unified platform architecture can help them re-imagine next-generation business and IT operations models.

Like many financial services organisations, their priorities include showing authentic customer-centric leadership and delivering frictionless experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. Talking to them reminded me of what I’ve heard many times: firms with hundreds of departments, thousands of applications, and no holistic view of technology, run fragmented platforms, systems, and programmes that only deliver point solutions to fulfil single processes in the ‘here and now’.

Next-gen financial services will need a next-gen, customer-centric operating model.

Firms that build a real-time picture of their entire estate will be best positioned to drive the big-picture transformation that’s required. With data observability helping turn data into actionable insight, you can start to truly control every hardware and software asset, and make smarter, better-informed decisions about future investments and strategies.

ServiceNow is already helping organisations keep pace with the demands of a next-generation financial services industry. With ServiceNow, you can connect real-time data across disparate assets and tools, and drive digital process automation to create consistent, automated workflows. That’s a great step towards providing frictionless experiences for employees and customers across multiple channels.

Clare Dancy of Lloyds Banking Group joined me at CXExchange to discuss how ServiceNow accelerated Lloyds’s technology management framework. She revealed how, by adding more modules onto the platform, her team is now able to monitor—and get ahead of—things like compliance in real time, and streamline customer-first processes, like payments journeys, which are now 98% automated.

Using ServiceNow, Lloyds Banking Group transformed its payments process in just 12 weeks, cutting the customer journey from seven days to 36 seconds.

Now is the time to reimagine customer-centric digital banking.

With disruptive new players in consumer banking and insurance, the pressure is on to compete—not through products, but experiences.

Whether they’re engaging with a mobile-phone provider, an e-commerce agent, or a streaming service, consumers are now accustomed to receiving hyper-personalised customer experiences, and they demand the same from financial service providers. Institutions are under increasing pressure to deliver more and provide ways to engage seamlessly through customers’ channels of choice.

Many of the organisations at CX Exchange told me they’re working hard to know their customers better. They’re looking for new, more accurate and holistic ways to measure and improve the end-to-end customer experiences that future reputations will be built on. Here, the missing link is integration. Systems, departments, and processes must come together in holistic, cross-enterprise workflows that deliver the speed, agility, and resilience required for a better customer—and employee—experience.

Add to this the power of analytics and a single source of truth, and firms can start to derive actionable insight from data, with end-to-end orchestration key in delivering a new way of working that leverages digital technology and existing operations, to help drive revenue, lower costs, and delight the customer.

“Systemising data with ServiceNow means linking all our preferred applications and point solutions. This has enabled us to become data led. And when your processes are fluid with real-time data, you can transform your customer experience. No more swivel chairs, just better customer care.”

Clare Dancy, Lloyds Banking Group  

With one platform, one data model, and one architecture, ServiceNow is helping transform customer and employee experiences. We’re already working with your peers to enable next-generation supplier management, enhance security, risk, and resilience, scale application development, maximise ESG strategies, and build robust technology foundations that meet tomorrow’s next-generation demands.

Learn more about the future of customer experience and how ServiceNow can help you build the firm of the future.

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