User experience (UX) in the financial sector combines customer thoughts, emotions, and behavior caused by using services/products or other interactions with financial brands throughout the touch points of their entire customer journey. This experience is so critical that any small mess can ruin the reputation a financial service provider (a bank or insurer) has built for years.
Therefore, industry players should design UX that focuses on delighting customers at every stage of their journey. The experience must resonate well with clients’ emotional connection with the brand. Brands should prioritize their digital customer experience as much as they care for offline experiences.
Digital-native customers, especially young ones, expect higher speeds, convenience, and easier accessibility. Therefore, excellent UX creates a fierce battleground where banks and insurance companies compete for loyal users and their money.
This post shares some benefits of creating user-centric UX for financial sector players and their customers. It also provides actionable tips to enable UX designers and Fintech brands to up their game.
Credit: from Netscribes
Benefits of UX in Banking and Insurance
The financial sector is embracing the digital revolution fast, with UX at the heart of user satisfaction. Here are the top benefits of efficient UX for banks and insurance companies.
Effective Customization
Modern customers want personalized experiences. They require convenient access to their account details, resources, and support without sifting through loads of irrelevant information. Embracing and leveraging digital UX enables industry brands to deliver these personalized experiences without excessive investment.
Reduced Costs
Every financial institution wants to minimize costs without compromising service quality. An efficient online infrastructure helps reduce operational costs. Companies that optimize digital structures save between 20 and 40 percent on their operating costs. Besides, automating customer-facing and serving processes lowers labor costs. It also minimizes the amount of premise space for handling workers, equipment, utilities, and supplies.
Optimal User Satisfaction
An excellent mobile banking app design promotes optimal user satisfaction. Giving your customers increased customer satisfaction boosts their overall experience. Improved customer satisfaction retains customers and fetches referrals. Companies with satisfied users keep their customers more than those with dissatisfied customers.
Thus, brands must blend efficiency with convenience to boost customer satisfaction in their digital ecosystems. It’s a proven way to incorporate speed, simplicity, and ease of access to service executives into their platforms.
Enhanced Conversion Rates
A recent McKinsey Digital report revealed that digital-centric customer experiences increase business conversion rates by up to 20 percent. Modern customers want to shop and interact with your offers at their highest convenience. Thus, mobile devices and apps come in handy when serving and satisfying these users, who, in turn, reward you with brand loyalty and commitment.
Onboarding New Clients
Onboarding new clients is another way excellent UX benefits the financial sector. Modern customers, especially digital natives, hate complex onboarding procedures. Instead, they prefer simple signing up for your services and products. Excessive paperwork and processes put off prospects.
Embracing digital UX experiences saves your newcomers time and energy. Therefore, consider these design components to boost their onboarding experience:
- Creating personalized experiences based on customers’ goals. For instance, customers opening checking accounts have different goals from those seeking mortgages.
- Let customers enter relevant details once and store them for auto-filling into all forms.
- If you need clients to share their ID details, get secure ways of uploading and storing them.
Supporting Issues or Disputes
Efficient UX promotes easy support of disputes and other arising issues. It lets brands escalate disputes like fraudulent credit card charges, which can cost you, clients. Resolving such matters using many phone calls or emails frustrates customers and gives them negative experiences. Fortunately, a smooth digital experience for resolving such issues promotes peaceful resolutions without unnecessarily straining customer relations.
Tips for Effective UX in the Financial Sector
So, how do UX designers and financial sector brands maximize UX for their various stakeholders, especially customers? Here are actionable tips to jumpstart you.
Simplify Matters
Don’t overload your users with excess processes and elements. Otherwise, you will frustrate them and ruin their user experience. Limit the number of elements in UI and visual characteristics diversity. Excess colors and shapes can be chaotic. Only use coherent and holistic features to form a design language your users understand easily.
Provoke User Emotions
Don’t forget to address users’ feelings. Excellent UX design is more than how nice your interfaces look. It should dig deep into how your customers feel.
Ask the Real Owners—Your Customers
Most banks think they can produce excellent user experiences and interfaces just because they have gifted designers. The truth is that customers, not designers, use your digital assets. So, consult them to understand what they face and feel while interacting with your virtual ecosystem. Otherwise, your users will end up with many avoidable, nasty experiences that could affect your relationship with them.
Understand Your User Personas
Understand your users by taking the time to know their personas, habits, and pain points before creating a digital solution for them. Gather all the details about their age, gender, occupations, locations, income brackets, and daily lives. This way, you will develop digital solutions based on their needs rather than your technical genius.
Handle All Security Issues
Lastly, address the most critical concern all digital users have—safety. In the online world, safety comes first and last. Crooks lurk in the virtual world, ready to steal money and cause other havoc. Therefore, prioritize safety and don’t leave it to users.
Use simple and understandable security solutions to encourage your customers to use your platforms. The latest biometrics features like face and fingerprint authentication should replace complex, older methods like card code generators and multi-step verification. Additionally, create ways to detect fraud, track suspicious activities, and identify potential threats in real-time.
Closing Remarks
UX in the banking and insurance industries has many benefits brands can reap. Also, knowing how to leverage virtual UX solutions is a sure way to improve your relationships with users and build a solid brand identity.
