The next frontier for digital CX in financial services

CX Network catches up with Shirley Campbell (pictured below), direction of CX at Payoneer, to talk changing customer expectations for digital channels

CX Network: What do you see as the driving trends in digital CX at present?

Shirley Campbell: I see a lot of companies investing in digital transformation and trying to chase after trends with the assumption that they equal great experiences that will exceed the customers’ expectations. These companies are trying to enhance experience through a feeling of hype from the top-notch technology they invested in, instead of really focusing on the customer experience.

In a way, it is believed that investing in the latest technology tells customers they are cared about. In my opinion, however, this is wrong and far from being customer-centric.

Digital experience investments must also be made around the core of CX. When customers choose your digital channels, they look for an easy, personalized, fully self-serviced experience. They don’t care if your chatbot has the best artificial intelligence (AI) or the best neuro-linguistic programming engine, if the bot itself is not designed with the right mind-set around tone of voice, personalization or simple calls to action.

If your company is looking to stay up to date with digital CX trends, I strongly suggest making it about choice. Focus on personalization, on end-to-end self-service flows, and allow automation that will simplify the process for customers and reduce their efforts while interacting.

CXN: In a highly competitive digital landscape, what does a digital financial services platform need to deliver in order to provide a “best in class” digital experience?

SC: Let me start by saying that, in general, financial services are all about the feeling of trust.

This is a huge responsibility when you are a cross-border financial services platform. Keeping this in mind, we need to make sure that the user experience of a platform or mobile app is shouting “trust” from every aspect and angle.

Trust, as Deloitte defines in its Trust HX metric  is built on four dimensions: humanity (“the company cares for me”), transparency (“they tell me everything I need to know”), reliability (“when they make a promise they deliver”) and capability (“they have the resources to create great products and experiences for me”).

Best in class digital experience is about enhancing these elements in the platform. The right tone or personalization is an example for humanity; communication outside the platform such as sending payment approvals emails or any other confirmations are enhancing both reliability and transparency; transparency is also gained by setting expectations clearly and provide all the “need to know” information every time a customer starts a self-service action.

Another way of answering this question is that the platform needs to deliver a feeling of empowerment. Customer empowerment is the process of providing customers with the tools and resources needed to be successful. When businesses help their customers make smarter choices, they develop a stronger bond and enhance their emotional experience which in return increases loyalty.

CXN: What does Payoneer do to ensure its customer journeys are friction-free?

SC: We see more and more companies are getting to the point of understanding that CX is not a “nice to have” program, but rather a crucial component in every action, process or journey design.

These companies are appointing dedicated senior managers for CX and, as CX’ers, we are the enablers and makers of amazing experiences. This itself is 90 percent of what it takes to ensure journeys are frictionless.

As for the remaining 10 percent, this is the hard day-to-day work of mapping the journeys and understanding where opportunities exist to connect the dots.

Having said that, let me emphasize one super important point – I am not familiar with any company which provides superb experiences 100 percent of the time.

Journeys sometimes have friction. This is a fact in a world of ongoing changes. The idea is all the time to monitor, identify and adjust. We do that by collecting feedback from our customers and using their insights to come up with actionable insights to overcome frictions and pain points and more importantly duplicate our strengths cross the journey.

CXN: Despite having fewer humans on customer support, fintechs such a Payoneer are often seen as the pioneers of modern-day CX. What do you believe is the next step for digital customer experiences in financial services?

SC: As mentioned earlier, the next step should be empowering customers to make informed decisions and take actions that will help them succeed.

We see a lot of financial services customers contact human support for an action that is available as self-service as well. When asked, these customers say they do not trust themselves enough to do it. They are afraid to make a mistake that will “cost” them.

What if we empower them to do the action whilst giving them the confidence that a possible mistake will not cost them? What if we provide them with the same automation tools we provide our call center advisors?

They can be their own human support by using the tools we already have in place internally because now they have access to it as well. Personalization will enhance the level of trusting the company. Empowerment will remove the dependency in human support and enhance the level of trust customers has toward themselves.

Payoneer helps businesses all around the world do grow cross border. Our brand is all about a universe of opportunities. We are investing great efforts and resources to provide our customers with more tools and resources that will help them grow, will make them feel more and more empowered and will provide them with lots of opportunities alongside great trusted, effortless amazing choices and experiences.

Shirley Campbell featured on the panel How to provide best in class digital experiences, on November 8, 2022. You can register to watch the session, live or on demand.