While the majority of financial service organizations consider customer experience management to be important, the reality of the matter is that the service provided is not as good as customers would expect. New research by contact center solutions provider Avaya (News - Alert) reveals that, although the disparity is large between what customers want and what businesses are currently offering, closing the gap is not impossible.
According to the research, customers are increasingly looking for an omnichannel, personalized and proactive customer experience. Specifically, 70 percent of customers expect financial service companies to link all threads of communication together in real-time across channels, as well as customer facing staff to have a single view of them in real-time when they contact the company. Additionally, 92 percent expect to be proactively notified of an issue and be offered a solution and 69 percent are seeking to be treated uniquely by being contacted the way they want and when they want with the products and services tailored to their preferences and shopping habits.
Despite the fact that 97 percent of business managers report that customer experience management is an important or extremely important part of their 2014 strategy, the number of companies that claim to have actually have a comprehensive program in place decreases to 64 percent.
Companies that have indeed implemented a comprehensive customer experience management program have certainly benefited from it as 98 percent report seeing improvements to their business as a direct result such in terms of customer retention, loyalty and satisfaction. Moreover, this has led to repeat purchasing and increases in total customer spend.
The Avaya study found that less than half of financial service companies actually meet all of customer's expectations.
The top three things standing in the way of closing the gap between business offerings and what customers want are technology limitations, inflexible business processes and inadequately trained staff. Among IT professionals who took the survey, 68 percent said that technology was preventing their organization from meeting customer expectations. Among business managers who participated in the survey, 55 percent said they feel that a lack of customer insight is holding the company back.
Edited by Alisen Downey