Fintechs ideally live and breathe fintech customer service. Instead of clunky internet banking UIs, fintech often alludes to modern and intuitive interfaces and personalised customer support and experience.
For a long time, the traditional banking industry has generated lousy press regarding customer support. This is because it has primarily been manual and has been driven by inconsistent management.
But financial technology is emerging as a game-changer and is changing the narrative around customer support for financial institutions. They are agile, offer personalised service, and are available 24×7 even remotely.
Hence, it is ubiquitous that fintech startups must strive to support their customers better.
Good Fintech Customer Service: A Strong Prerequisite for Startups
The 2008 financial crisis weakened people’s trust in traditional public banks and pivoted their attention towards the newer, fancier fintech revolution, especially for the younger generation.
Therefore today, at the height of the digital revolution, it is now upon these fintech service providers to continue providing the best fintech customer service and user experience to their customers.
The idea is to fill the shortcomings of traditional brick and mortar banking institutions. It means fintech must allow customers to:
- Ask questions easily.
- Manage transactions seamlessly.
- Raise concerns and get them quickly solved.
- Switch between automated support and self-service seamlessly.
- Receive highly personalised services and product recommendations.
- Offer customer support 24×7 for 365 days!
Steps Fintechs Should Take for a Good Customer Service
Here is a list of essential steps that every fintech startup needs to implement in the customer service domain to sustain and thrive in the already competitive fintech landscape.
1. Build lasting conversations
When customers put their money into a fintech-related product, they are bound to expect exceptional results, both in terms of ease and convenience and a satisfactory outcome of the whole experience.
Addressing customer issues well is not a one-off situation or a randomly occurring dynamic. On the contrary, it is a perpetual cycle that needs to be appropriately handled every time with the same earnest intention.
Everything should be accounted for – positive online reviews, social media engagement, word-of-mouth marketing, especially in the all-invasive technologically led lives of people today.
It helps to jot down the various interfaces through which the customers can reach out, eg, phone, email, social media, etc., and build a customer service strategy.
2. Stay consistent
When a customer receives different solutions for the same problem across the various channels of an organisation, it leaves them feeling confused and unsure of the team’s capabilities, no matter how great the end-product may be.
Therefore, staying consistent in providing solutions across the different channels is the preamble of good customer service. A good 40% of customers will approach multiple channels for getting answers on the same issue, as reflected in a recent study.
This clearly states the importance of creating an omnichannel support solution to help a fintech startup manage incoming requests from each channel in a single view.
After all, nothing beats a consistency-led organisation bent on providing a great experience to their customers from start to end.
3. Introduce human element strategically
While automation is hands-down an innate and must-have aspect of a good fintech solution, the importance of strategically introducing a human element into their offerings is one aspect that should be looked into as well.
Ideally, many factors can play here in deciding when to include human interaction into the picture, such as customer demographics, the extent of their technical know-how, and the end-product itself.
That being said, the whole premise of a fintech product that excites a customer can be the liberty and independence with which they can seamlessly invest or transact.
Speaking to a customer service representative, therefore, can seem paradoxical to the entire value proposition. However, what is not paradoxical or ironic is giving your customers the option to interact with a human as and when they need it.
It is up to the fintech start-ups to decide their course and build in the right degree of human interaction, which solves customer problems efficiently, without over saturating the process with human contact.
4. Gather customer feedback and act on it
Not all customer feedback can be gathered from conducting random feedback surveys and questionnaires. Instead, there can be very subtle, different ways of gathering customer feedback that fintech start-ups should know, provided they look beyond the obvious.
An excellent place to start can be in-house by holding meaningful conversations with the sales, support and customer success teams.
Understand the customers’ selling points and pain points, as these teams handle the front-end of the whole system and are one of the first employees to get in touch with a potential customer directly.
Pay attention to social media posts, company reviews, cancellations, support ticket trends etc. A good customer service strategy involves understanding the prevailing customer sentiment around the product and then addressing the issues.
It is essential to read between the lines and gather important customer feedback to save the fintech start-ups a lot of costs.
Recipe for Success
Producing happy customers that experience a wow factor overall, regardless of the technological strength or advancement of their products, is the recipe for success for a fintech startup.
If you are a fintech with lending as a product, faster and more accurate loan approval will significantly depend on you. Finezza offers state-of-the-art lending lifecycle management and credit evaluation services.
We provide secure APIs and data pipelines that are simple to integrate, making us platform-agnostic. However, we also prioritize your security requirements, including data-access controls.
For more information on how we can help you scale up your financial services, contact us today!
Leave a Reply