Almost every bank today is doing some type of customer journey mapping or redesign.  However, customers continue to have many of the same customer experience challenges that they have had for a while.

For example, a recent Genpact assessment showed that customers of one of the UK’s top banks face a particularly difficult process for accessing secure messages from the bank’s own mobile app. They must go through eight different steps, including being pushed out of the app to a website not optimized for mobile, at which point they have to re-authenticate.  This limits the usability of the app, as well as the overall customer success and satisfaction.  In comparison, challenger-bank Monzo offers real-time chat-style messaging.

To deliver excellent customer experience, banks need a customer journey redesign approach that incorporates all the implementation steps required to make the redesign a reality. This can only be achieved through transformation in the front, middle, and back offices.

Front-to-back transformation requires:

• Participation from cross-functional teams representing the various areas involved directly and indirectly in the process.  It is particularly important to have participation from those areas holding responsibility for the operations underlying the current and future customer experience. 
• Participation from technology teams to identify not only what needs to be done but, more importantly, defining how to do it and then actually doing it. 
• Measuring the impact.  This means monitoring throughout the implementation, defining new sets of key performance indicators and diagnostic measures, and providing the necessary change management to embrace a customer-first go to market strategy.

This front-to-back customer journey transformation is particularly important right now because of three factors:

• Increasing customer expectations
• Aggressive growth of start-ups
• Changes in technology

In today’s digital-first world, in which customers can ask almost anything to their smart speakers, ease-of-use expectations are rising exponentially.  If customers have a problem, they should be able to click a button to resolve it.  Better still, the problem should have been avoided in the first place.

Such expectations are reinforced by an increasing number of start-ups that are focused on successfully meeting those expectations.  Whether it is quick paperless loans, no-fee AI-guided investing, or low cost immediate international money transfers, challengers are bridging the gap between growing customer expectations and slow-moving incumbent banks.

Of course, all of this is possible thanks to the significant changes in technology that makes mass customization and automation possible.  Examples of such technologies include:

• Machine learning and artificial intelligence, which together enable the automation and acceleration of processes that used to require reviewing and decisioning by humans alone.
• Various real-time communication channels.

Customer expectations are based on reality, and therefore banks have no excuse for not meeting them.

Banks need to get serious about improving their customers’ journeys.  They need to look at every single step of the journey and question every single hurdle that their customers face, even if it is rooted deep in the back office. Indeed, now that most banks have advanced digital front-ends, the key to significant customer experience improvement is to look at the less evident contributors to customer experience and leverage technology to re-imagine the middle and back office processes that have been neglected for decades.  To make this happen customer journey redesign must be a multidisciplinary cross-functional effort, felt and sponsored throughout the bank, not just by the digital, marketing, or business areas.

What do you think?  Has your organization undertaken customer experience redesign efforts?  What impact have you seen?  What lessons have you learned?