Optimising the customer experience: Lessons for banks from tech giants

Customer experience has received growing attention as an essential element of the overall customer relationship for banks. The omnipresence of tech giants, their customer centricity and their highly intuitive and user-friendly customer experiences are changing users’ expectations regarding banks’ digital and digitally provided services and points of customer contact. This raises the question of which aspects customers value in their interactions with tech giants and which insights banks can derive for optimising their customer interfaces, experiences and journeys. The present paper is among the first to analyse these various aspects and to derive relevant insights and lessons learned for banks. The study is based on a quantitative online survey with 573 participants. Participants were asked about their degree of satisfaction and loyalty regarding their current bank, the aspects they value most in their interaction with tech giants, in general as well as with their favourite tech giant, and which of these aspects they would like their bank to adopt. Convenience and ease of usability of services, products and interfaces; the constant availability of services regardless of time and place; the seamless integration across different channels and access devices; and the high aesthetics of interfaces and services were considered valuable by more than 70 per cent of the respondents. In particular, the degree of convenience, extensive availability, speed and easily understandable interfaces were also rated highest in terms of characteristics that users would like their banks to adopt. For banks, this means that the design and optimisation of their digital customer experiences should be customer-centric and should focus on intuitive usability, timely delivery of services and information, comprehensive availability of functionalities and relevant data as well as an appealing design of their customer interfaces.