The banking industry has become a highly competitive industry with a lot of private players entering the space. From being places to deposit and withdraw money and the seek loans, banks have now become the hubs for fuelling new projects and providing the necessary push to economies around the globe.
From old age friendly to startup friendly, banks have come a long way and even sport their new avatars in their offices with their corporate logo and stylish formal attires. Yet, the online banking scenario is still caught in the early 2000’s and refuses to move ahead. Online banking experience today is as cluttered as banks were a decade ago and is far from being an end to end banking solution in itself. CC Bank realized this and started creating login tutorials like this one for BB&T Bank.
Here are a few tips to make online banking experience better for your customers:
Add Quality To Design
As needs of online banking users have grown, banks have been quick to add extra functionality to their websites but on the same design backbone. This has made online banking interfaces look clunky and a cluttered with a lot of functionality fitted into a small space. Multitasking and Multi functionality are two different things that online banking spaces seem to have mixed. What is needed is an entirely new approach to designing online banking interfaces where quality of design and ease of usage is given importance rather than number of functions.
End-to-End Online Banking
Customers hate it when part of their work is done online in a matter of seconds while the other half (which requires human intervention) takes 24-48 hours. When providing an online banking solution, banks must ensure it is an end to end solution for all the functions that are available. By on boarding only a part of the function, banks are actually increasing user frustration and lowering user experience.
Break The Walls
Traditionally, banks have been functioned as a set of different departments, each performing a function or two and offering a host of products for their own domain. The same setup has been carried forward to the internal software as well. During customer interaction, banking executives can only visualise certain aspects of the customer’s financials and recommend products available from their own kitty. This product may not be useful for the customer at all. By sharing customer information across all people dealing with the customer, banks can now provide solutions that are customer centric rather than product centric.
New Generation Customer Support
It is high time that banks stopped pretending that their FAQs page is sufficient to answer each and every customer’s doubts. Online banking customers prefer instant help rather than emailing tech support/ calling up a bank official for clarifications. A chatbot comes in handy for the user to sort doubts or simply know how to seekhelp. An intelligent chatbot can not only address the customer’s doubts but also improve the user experience manifold.
Find The Gaps
Since online banking is still a new way of banking there are many areas where the user experience can be enhanced. By using big data analytics, you can find patterns in user behaviour and identify gaps exist in your offerings. Attend to those and see customer satisfaction rise within in your existing customers. Deliver this well for all customers, and this becomes a point for new customers to bank with you.
Be Future Ready
Plan and create your online banking interfaces with an eye on the future. In the future, banks that offer bulky and age old interfaces might simply become the reason for customer dropouts, since nobody would actually want to go to a bank. By integrating artificial intelligence and microdevices, banking will not be limited to specific apps on smartphones but simply an instruction that you would give your digital assistant or IoT device. You can’t start building your device, when others already have the products in the market.
Online banking is definitely the future of internet banking and probably your only point of interaction with the customer in the future. Whether you add or lose customers will largely depend on their user experience. Little improvements on a continuous basis will go a long way into keeping your customers happy and is not something that can be compromised upon.
