The Role of User Experience (UX) in Personalizing Financial Services: Enhancing Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty in Banking

In recent years, the banking sector has been facing a new set of challenges. The days when customers used one bank for a lifetime are gone. Increased competition from fintechs, a short attention span, and lower patience are causing people to unsentimentally move their savings to brands that will offer them a better experience.

People want to feel an emotional attachment to the brand they trust. Finance is an industry where these feelings should be highlighted, as it involves such a fragile aspect as money saving. Each customer wants to be treated in the best possible way, regardless of their account balance. That’s why they are no longer satisfied with templated communications that don’t even include such minimal personalization as a direct return to the recipient or the first name in correspondence.

How do you win the marathon for attention and effectively win customers? Financial UX design provides invaluable help, allowing you to customize your communication and identify with your potential customers. However, there is more to UX than a well-crafted website and a fancy mobile banking app. If you want your customers to have positive feelings just for you, make sure you also provide top-notch customer service and deliver a personalized offer before they think of it. How to improve the user experience? Check out the tips in the following paragraphs.

Today, customers consciously choose products and services. They search for interesting information about different brands and decide to use the one that offers attractive financial terms and follows similar values. Brands that do not use personalization in any way are getting pushed away by distinctive competitors.

What is personalization in the financial industry? It’s creating a tailored offer for customers based on data such as age, location, income level, or the history of chosen services. In digital banking, you can personalize the website, social media content, a deposit/loan with individual percentage rates, or discounts on partners’ services.

And if your financial institution is way behind with customization, we have bad news for you. Not personalization, but hyperpersonalization is now the key to providing an excellent customer experience. Hyperpersonalization involves embedding your company’s response in a specific context, making the customer feel you are standing by them like a best friend. An invaluable help in delivering a banking experience that meets the current customers’ needs are AI and ML tools, which extract users’ desires from data inputs.

Start to build a collective of digital banking UX and UI elements. You will see that your customers are more engaged and eager to take advantage of the opportunities because those are finally tailored to their needs. Gradually, you will see lower customer churn and consecutive growth of conversion and ROI as people will finally identify with your brand and feel part of it.

Digital banking user experience is a set of impressions the finance users have during their interaction with your institution through the banking website or mobile app. The UX consists of checking account balances, making transfers, or opening an online savings account. The user journey should be simplified as much as possible so that customers don’t waste time and don’t connect online banking with unpleasant feelings.

Knowledgeable customers understand what they need when using digital products and services. Their expectations are rising, so they won’t settle for ill-conceived solutions. Instead, they will look for a competitive institution with a better banking UX strategy. Find out which elements of UX and UI design in banking get the most attention.

To keep customers in your business and provide the best experience, make your digital services as easy to use as possible. Simplify the user interface and conversion paths. Use OCR to automatically read the vital information from files so that customers don’t have to transcribe documents by hand.

Ensure responsiveness, including users of computers, smartphones, and other mobile devices. In a world full of diversified devices, adjust your digital banking interfaces to the maximum number of options. Try not to force people who are used to smartphones to switch to laptops only to log into their accounts.

People with disabilities also want to control their finances in the easiest possible way. Remember about them in the design process by adding the features that will help them check their balance, transfer money, and more.

With all that said, try to drop the official tone and let your customers have fun using the banking platform every day.

The best UX banking design is not a reflection of your ideas but a response to customers’ expectations. Therefore, step into your buyers’ shoes (on your own or with the help of UX designers) and see where they find it uncomfortable to use the banking interface.

Simplify to the maximum instead of overloading your site or app with details relevant only to you. The virtual world is stuffed enough with content, so you will win by reducing chaos in the interface design. If you have concerns, start by redesigning individual elements with the help of experienced banking industry software experts.

At this point, you may think that customizing everything is impossible. However, personalization starts at the very moment of understanding your customer. How do you do it? Start using the first-party data your customers leave behind as they browse your site, log in, and perform various actions. According to a McKinsey report, only 28% of banks have reached for this data and concluded it using AI tools.

AI will also help you personalize customer service with conversational AI chatbots available 24/7. Equipping them to answer customers’ most common questions will allow them to get advice instantly. You will raise their satisfaction level and reduce the costs of maintaining first-line support.

Are you concerned about the increasing churn of customers to your competitors? Changing your UX design approach can help you effectively retain them. Making the mobile banking application and other digital channels easier will increase their loyalty, as they won’t have to look for another bank with a more intuitive digital platform. Tailoring your offerings based on the financial history or interests of particular groups of consumers will help them feel understood, even though they haven’t exchanged a word with bank employees.

Investing in improving UX design can help you save in other areas, such as customer acquisition. More prospects will choose your bank on their own, encouraged by positive feedback from current customers, and you can invest the savings in delivering an even better digital customer experience.

Happy customers are the best advertising. That’s why your task is to ensure their digital banking experience is superior every time and encourage them to use your services again. Implement, test, and don’t be afraid of modern solutions to see through your customers and respond in advance to their future desires.

If you want to comprehensively improve user experience in banking, take advantage of the practical experience of Scalo – specialists in user-friendly digital banking solutions. By working with us, your investment in UX design will allow you to build a large circle of trusted customers and an image of a bank that understands them. Contact Scalo and set trends for banking and fintech institutions in the new digital era.