By definition, a truly frictionless customer experience (CX) is unobtainable, even though it is the end state every FinTech company strives for.
However, the focus falls on providing enhanced experiences that stem from the points of friction identified across the customer journey.
In doing so, businesses can improve the products, processes, and services they deliver.
Removing Friction
Modern customers expect FinTechs to focus as much on the experience they provide as on the products and services being offered. An enhanced experience is important because it shows customers that FinTechs acknowledge its failures and is working on improving those areas while also removing the elements that can lead to dissatisfaction.
For organisations that get it right, success looks like increasing customer satisfaction, retention, and referrals largely due to making sure pain points are seen, heard, and addressed.
This is done by tracking the customer journey, measuring satisfaction, and customer effort. Ensuring that customer sentiment and the voice of the customer are prioritised across the business guarantee bonus points.
Channels of Engagement
For this to happen, the company must embrace all of the channels within its capabilities to invest in an omnichannel CX. A PWC report found that the number of companies doing this has increased by more than 60% in recent years.
At Mukuru, their purpose is to enable greater degrees of financial inclusion for customers on the African continent – still predominantly cash-based – and globally, which is why we take a tailored approach to customer channels.
Channels such as USSD and WhatsApp perform well across Africa, whereas their app is a more relevant channel for UK customers. They have seen the impact of this strategy with WhatsApp, their biggest transacting customer channel in South Africa, where the proportion of transacting customers has almost doubled in the last three years.
Continuous Journey
One of the biggest mistakes any FinTech can make is to assume that creating a frictionless experience is a once-off exercise. As mentioned, becoming frictionless is an end goal that will never be fully realised. Driving this is setting the business up to learn from its past CX mistakes.
To do so requires the process of CX improvements to be formalised and rolled out to all applicable areas of the business.
We must empower service staff to resolve customer pain points.
Additionally, there is a growing need to establish effective self-service solutions where customers become less reliant on human touchpoints.
Perhaps most crucially, customer success can only be realised by continually monitoring the journey, touchpoints, and the voice of the customer.
The Bottom Line
Fintechs should strive to make every customer interaction with the business a positive one. By removing friction and implementing an omnichannel strategy, fintechs can improve customer satisfaction, retention and referrals.
Continuous monitoring of the customer journey and implementing improvements accordingly is crucial to achieving a frictionless customer experience.
