One of the biggest challenges faced by fintechs, financial institutions and everyone else providing embedded financial services today is offering their customers a seamless experience. This, however, tends to clash with maximizing security online. And it is, after all, the latter that most customers value by far over convenience. So, how does one get out of this bind? Viktorija Mažūnė, Customer Experience Director at ConnectPay, has the answers.
Striking the perfect balance between security and convenience isn’t always easy. Security features generally come with sacrifices, the inconveniences associated with robust security measures can be significantly reduced by a redoubled focus on personalization. The key thing here is that customers want to feel heard and understood by a real person on the other end. This may be easy enough for companies to do early on. But at some point, the growing customer base comes to outstrip their capacity of hiring support staff. When this happens, using AI becomes pretty much inevitable – which does not bode well for personalization. Or does it?
For one, a lot hinges on data – the gold of the digital era – and how companies use it. With the help of AI, this data can yield a wealth of actionable insights that allow businesses to make tailored offers to individual customers. Receiving a newsletter or being notified of a general discount is one thing. Getting an offer that’s actually valuable because it matches one’s needs and preferences – is quite another.
As Viktorija told us, no less also hinges on how businesses communicate with their customers. “What I’ve learned over the years is that people want to be in the loop. Even when you can’t help them directly, just explaining why something is being done meets with a positive reaction – every single time! And this is especially true of complaints regarding functionalities implemented to boost security. When I tell people that the one extra step they’re now required to take is intended to protect them, suddenly it’s all smiles. Their loyalty, rather than returning to baseline, actually goes up as a result”.
It should also be noted that personalization should be understood not only as tailoring services to individual customers, but also as adopting a customer-centric approach more generally. For instance, there may be a massive experiential difference between two investment platforms during onboarding, even though both require their users to provide the same personal data. In one case, people may feel as if they’re being interrogated and will be denied something if things don’t go perfectly. Whereas in the other case, the interface is easy to use, the tone of communication is helpful and friendly, and the whole process is well-integrated and feels organic. From this we can deduce that “personal touch” is operative here, too. Only in this context, the goal is to provide everyone with a seamless experience, rather than any individual customer.
Finally, here’s what Viktorija had to say about the importance of employing a variety of communication channels when trying to give customers a truly personalized experience:
“Look, no one likes to be bothered when there’s no pressing need for that. Bombarding people with endless messages and notifications can easily wear them out. But what about switching the channel of communication from time to time? Personally, I like to give my customers a call when a significant event is impending. Maybe their account is soon to be closed due to prolonged inactivity. Or maybe their data is set to be deleted within a matter of days. In such cases, people really appreciate hearing a human voice on the line, just making a friendly inquiry. This shows you care and respect their time enough not to pester them with calls about some discount they already know about”.
As customers have come to expect seamlessnes as the default for all online platforms, they‘re now increasingly seeking personalized experiences, too. Hopefully, we‘ve managed to demonstrate that personalization doesn‘t always have to break the bank – even a handful of relatively simple adjustments can have a big effect.
