Closing the experience gap in banking: Humanising customer experience in four dimensions

In the rush to translate analogue interactions into the digital space, many financial institutions (FIs) skipped a step. They failed to define the holistic customer experience (CX) — the subjective thoughts, feelings, sensations and actions — that they want their tools to generate. This is a significant oversight, because a decade of developments in the behavioral and social sciences have demonstrated that business returns accrue from ensuring that brands engage not only the intellectual but also the emotional, sensorial and behavioral dimensions of human experience. In this paper, we present the first model designed to assess multidimensional experience in the banking sector. The humanising customer experience (HCX) model, developed by brand experience agency Monigle in partnership with American Banker, predicts 78 per cent of bank customer satisfaction and net promoter score (NPS). It measures more than 60 variables, crafted for their relevance to the financial sector, which together create the four dimensions of experience that are proven to drive important customer outcomes. By revealing the dimensions and attributes where FIs are currently lagging, the HCX framework offers newfound precision in directing future CX investments. The inaugural year of data, from 2021, shows that FIs are strongest in delivering on behavioral and intellectual experiences, while trailing in sensorial and emotional dimensions. After outlining the social sciences backdrop of this model and explaining its predictive power, we discuss several areas of industry focus where lopsided investments have led to less than fully humanised CX. We conclude that banks need to design experiences that yield emotional benefits, move from providing self-service tools to supporting customers’ financial self-actualisation, and approach services from a fully interactional rather than transactional perspective.