The importance of finding the single voice of the customer in finance

Most organisations understand their customers on varying levels. Marketing knows their customers in one context while customer services, in-store staff, the board, shareholders and digital teams know them in another. The more scaled a company, the more likely they will have increased touchpoints between themselves and their customers. And from this we can know that with scale comes complexity.

The newer players in the market, cloud enabled and often cater to specific customer segments with a focus on fewer products and services. For legacy financial institutions with widely expanded and often global portfolio of products and services catering for a broad range of customer segments. And that it is a much much bigger challenge to tackle. With the vast amounts of customer data they have, it will be harder to respond to their specific needs. Because of this, it is important for bigger businesses to prioritise unifying the various channels and touchpoints they use to reach their customers and their employees to better serve them.

Understanding the customer across the journey, their motivations and behaviours and how the company enables the employee to best serve that experience is the real opportunity. Their belief is to be a truly customer-centric business. And hence they must be an employee-centric one. 58% of companies agreed that they are not investing enough in employee enablement. So with this lack of investment in employee-enablement and an incomplete understanding of the customer across touchpoints, the big businesses can’t drive value to their customer.

Take Lloyds Bank, announced ambitious plans to enter into the housing rental market. By this they are opening up opportunities to diversify its revenue streams. And by this they can enter into new conversations with existing and prospective new customers. Lloyds aligned the teams handling customers with current accounts looking to move house with those teams looking to provide insurance offers. Companies that underinvest in the full understanding and enabling the employee leads to employee and customer dissatisfaction. With this pandemic leading to record digital acceleration the levels of consumer expectation around experience has shifted hugely. Providing the systems and processes that make the day-to-day brand experience, And that for both employees and customers is the key. And it is also important to see it as a positive process. Customer expectations shift regularly according to the technology and their behaviours also adapt as per that. But starting to prioritise aligning departments and the data they receive is now more essential.