How to Plan and Refine Your Bank’s Self-Service Experience

Self-service is the great promise for banks: enabling your support capabilities to scale, saving time for your teams to focus on the items that truly need to be high-touch, and ultimately delivering a great experience at every step. 

As you enhance, refine, or overhaul your self-service experience, here are five things to consider. 

1. Know your customers.

Creating a customer-centric experience is conceptually very simple—just focus on what the customer needs and deliver it—but it’s never that easy. 

You probably already have a great handle on who your customers are, but you may need to dig a little deeper to find out what they truly need and want, to enable excellent self-service. You might be surprised to discover where their banking experience is breaking down and what changes could make the biggest difference. 

For example, how is your content serving your audience? Your customers can’t self-service if they don’t understand your language and your processes. A few examples and places to look for customer self-service challenges: 

1. Commonly, many banks face a disconnect between compliance-mandated language and the kind of language a marketing department uses to speak to customers. 
2. Similarly, customer support regularly sees gaps in the self-service experience—they get the calls and inquiries—but they can't address those gaps without marketing and product team assistance. 

The great news is, if your current processes and content hinder your customers, you have it in your power to change their experience and your outcomes. 

Customers will not self-serve if self-service is difficult or frustrating. Ensure your user experience, content, and offerings first and foremost, help your customers easily solve their problems and meet their needs. 

2. You’re one organization. Act like it. 

Few things frustrate customers more than entering and re-entering the same information again and again (or repeating it again and again over the phone). Few things destroy the customer experience faster; few things show more clearly that your bank is full of disparate teams not working together. 

Critical for self-service is a smooth, unified experience. 

A disjointed self-service experience only serves to frustrate customers and increase their need for individual support. 

3. Build your tech stack for interoperability. 

Interoperability is arguably the greatest technology challenge and opportunity in the financial services sector right now. Fintechs are multiplying and most do one thing and do it exceedingly well—resulting in a lot of tools managed in an open banking/API-driven ecosystem. Interoperability needs to be handled deliberately and with a focus on how the generated data will be used. 

Think about how your technology does (or does not) create an operational backbone that supports the self-service experience: 

• Are you serving up the information your customers need when they need it? 
• Is everything in one place or do they have to hunt for it, log into multiple interfaces, etc.? 
• How are your systems working together to provide optimal engagement?

One area to hone in on: consider the relationship between your public-facing website and the different application processes you offer from a self-service perspective. 

• If people accidentally entered the wrong process—maybe they realize they wanted to apply for a different credit card—can they transfer that information to a different process? 
• Can they get their status on that application from anywhere or do they have to go to a specific hard-to-find spot? 
• Is your email system set up to notify them of status changes and important information, or do they have to log into your website (or you only email them about certain products)? 
  • What about texts, if that’s what they prefer? 
  • And can that preference (text vs. email) be universal, or is it segmented by product?

You want a set of systems that work together to deliver a single experience that supports your customers every step of the way. 

4. Tie all operations to your digital platform. 

We all know that digital platforms provide a critical path for your customers to find and do business with you. What’s easy to overlook is how many backend operations support the success of that platform. Think of it as your operations feeding your digital platform—your backend processes change, enabling change to your digital platform and the customer experience you create. Ultimately, as you measure customer behavior and gather insights, you will learn more, allowing you to evolve your digital platform and operations over time. 

When Phase2 builds custom digital platforms, our focus is always on your business needs and achieving your goals. As you think about self-service, ponder what those goals might be: customer-satisfaction-related goals, call center expenses, growth in number of customer accounts, and so on. Unlocking the potential of your self-service opportunities requires tailoring your digital platform and operations in light of those goals. 

5. Be prepared for the times when self-serve isn’t cutting it. 

Connecting with a human is an imperative for a struggling customer. Having a real person solve problems when your customer hits a self-service wall is a key to loyalty-building. Know when to step in. Don’t leave your customers in an endless loop trying unsuccessfully to self-serve. And don’t make it hard for them when self-service isn’t working and they really need help. 

Many different industries employ chatbots that guide customers through workflows, automation, and AI, then direct them to a real person—or enable them to connect to a real person—if they still require assistance. What ways can you apply that concept across your bank? As one example, maybe a loan application has been sitting in the same status for awhile and outreach would be appropriate. 

There are many possibilities and ways to provide your customers with self-service, but what you can’t afford to do is assume that it will be enough. They still need personal interactions, but combined with effective self-service, you will be able to help your teams, offerings, and products scale. 

We hope you enjoyed reading the Phase2 blog! Please subscribe below for regular updates and industry insights.