Improving customer experience (CX) in financial services doesn’t begin with the latest CX tools or technology—it starts with business fundamentals. Aligning goals, getting leadership buy-in, and creating a culture that reflects and rewards your CX priorities are just some of the foundational steps needed to ensure you begin your CX journey on solid footing—and stay firmly on the path to success as your organization’s needs and customer expectations evolve.
CSP’s newest white paper, Stages of the CX Journey in Financial Services, explores these core imperatives and their importance in creating a clear, strategic approach to customer experience. In this article, we’ll introduce you to each step and the critical role it plays in helping you and your team consistently earn customer trust and loyalty while driving long-term growth.
Create a clear and specific CX vision
Simply saying you want to “improve customer experiences” doesn’t give you or your team enough direction on what to change or do differently to drive CX success. You need to take time to define what this really means for your organization. What kind of experience should customers have at every touchpoint? What actions do you want them to take? What feelings do you want to evoke about your brand and organization? Once defined, get the word out by weaving it into internal and external messaging and communications.
Why it’s critical: A clear and specific CX vision helps focus your efforts and your initiatives. Your team can zero in on the specific parts of the customer experience that help drive desired results.
Align CX to your business strategy
Once you’ve defined a clear CX vision, translate it into specific objectives that align to and support your broader business strategy. For example, if your business goal is to grow cross-sales, your CX objectives might include identifying touchpoints where cross-selling is most effective, personalizing product recommendations to existing customers, and streamlining processes to make it easier for them to add new products and services.
Why it’s critical: Aligning CX to your strategic business goals helps connect the dots to core objectives like sales growth and brand value, making it easier to gain buy-in, secure budget, and demonstrate impact.
Foster leadership buy-in—and ownership
It’s critical for leadership to “walk the talk” when it comes to conveying the importance of CX in your organization. Leadership can make a huge impact by weaving CX metrics into reviews and discussions about business performance, for example, and using CX data to inform strategic decisions on investments, product roadmaps, and process improvements. By embracing CX at the highest levels, employees are more likely to see it as a top priority.
Why it’s critical: When executives treat customer experience as a business strategy—not just a nice-to-have, the rest of the organization follows suit. This not only strengthens employee engagement and commitment to CX, but it also helps create a shared sense of CX ownership and accountability across the organization.
Create a CX-centric culture
Employees need to understand not only what CX involves, but also why it matters—and how their individual roles contribute to it. That means embedding CX into onboarding, performance evaluations, team goals, and daily workflows. It also means investing in the right tools and training to help employees deliver on your CX promise, whether they’re on the front line of customer care or enabling a process behind the scenes.
Why it’s critical: When CX becomes part of your organization’s culture, it starts to influence every aspect of how teams and individuals work, collaborate, solve problems and, of course, serve customers. When this happens, CX becomes everyone’s job and priority. That can translate into a powerful competitive advantage and a source of continuous value for customers.
Recognize and reward CX wins
Reinforce your commitment to delivering strong customer experiences with CX-aligned incentives, recognition and rewards. Tap into your CX data to highlight what’s working. Celebrate wins, share feedback, and reward employee and team performance and behaviors that align with your CX vision and goals, from taking initiative to address a customer concern to going above and beyond to earn a customer’s trust and business.
Why it’s critical: Recognizing and rewarding CX wins and behaviors can be a powerful motivating force for employees, giving them even more reason to take ownership, stay engaged, and deliver exceptional service that drives lasting loyalty and business growth.
Prepare for now—and what’s next
With clear goals and leadership support in place, the next step is to turn intention into execution. That means building a CX framework that is structured enough to deliver consistent results, yet flexible and scalable enough to respond to new opportunities and evolving customer expectations. Begin by defining ownership and accountability across teams and then establish clear roles, responsibilities and a regular review cadence to keep your efforts on track, budget and strategy.
Why it’s critical: By laying the foundation for sustainable execution and improvement, you future-proof your CX strategy and position your organization to deliver lasting value to customers at every stage of your CX journey.
Ready to Learn More?
Learn more about these foundational elements and other key stages of the CX journey by downloading Stages of the CX Journey in Financial Services today. Whether you’re just starting out or planning to refine a mature program, contact our CSP team to learn how we can help you create a solid foundation for sustainable success at every stage of your CX journey.
