Investing in customer experience (CX) is profitable in the long run. In a shorter perspective, it changes the look and feel of your application. Ultimately, it impacts sales, marketing, the image of your brand, and much more. This is a piece about the journey-centric design in fintech. Don’t take it for granted. Grant yourself time to fully digest the impact on your business.

Customer experience-related gains can derive from many sources, including additional product purchases, cross-selling and upselling, subscription services, interest-based financing, and much more. Companies that invest in journey-centric design experience significant growth and benefits. For every 10 percentage points increase in customer satisfaction, they can increase revenue while reducing churn. 

OK but why exactly is all of that important?

Why journey-centric design in fintech is essential for your business?

Like every business, fintech-related apps have sales funnels. The problem is that customers and prospects leave the funnel at every given moment. That is problematic since you need knowledge, tools, and solutions for every stage of the funnel. Customer journey mapping (CJM) can help with this. The part of CJM is journey-centric design. It helps you with the identification of multiple touchpoints within a product or service and identifies chances to improve product quality and increase conversion.

To top it all, fintech has some unique challenges that none of the other industries experience. Oversight from regulatory bodies puts additional pressure on business owners and creates the need for additional steps in the process of customer acquisition.   

Yes, but the problem is that the siloed, product-centric operational model of the past has become restrictive and ineffective. Businesses are left trying to serve today’s customers with yesterday’s solutions. Customer experiences are still fragmented and need omnichannel solutions. They are full of inconsistencies and roadblocks that generates customer frustration.

How to deal? Implementing journey-centric design if fintech is a key. It’s an approach and framework that focuses business and design operations around customer journeys.

There’s no need for revolution, though. Instead, find a way to create a hyperloop (as a system of transportation of information and data-driven business decisions) between various silos. The way to do that is to mobilize the entire organization toward the facilitation of end-to-end journey design and optimization.

Benefits of journey-centric design in fintech

Journey-centric design enables organizations to apply user-centered design at both the micro level (interfaces within products) and the macro level (service delivery through customer journeys).

Benefits span across (but are not limited to):

  • opportunities for design innovation, resulting in improved business outcomes
  • strategic and business-driven approach to service delivery
  • advanced behavioral data and measurement of design’s return on investment (ROI)
  • opportunities for AI-driven solutions to personalize service delivery for improved outcomes

Journey experiences are a largely untapped space for design innovation. For this reason, journey-centric design allows companies to solve larger service-delivery problems with transformational solutions. Optimizing how services are delivered maximizes revenue, minimizes the cost to serve, and boosts overall customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value.

Product-focused design happens on product teams that are far removed from top-level business strategies. Journey-centered design gives executive decision makers access to the big picture of their customers’ experiences with the organization. It also enables them to turn business initiatives into digital solutions that work well across multiple products as opposed to separate fixes tailored to each product in isolation.

Journey-centric design operations allow the organization to be nimbler in rolling out broad-scope business initiatives that are cohesively delivered across products.

Journey-centric design operations enable businesses to examine customer activities from an end-to-end perspective. Developing and maturing this practice includes establishing analytics and performance metrics centered around the longitudinal journeys that generate revenue for the business.

Journey-level analytics are relevant and actionable for business stakeholders, who care more about the outcomes of customer journeys than about the outcomes of individual steps that customers take within products. In addition, having journey-level analytics and performance benchmarks makes it easier to demonstrate the impact of journey-centric design initiatives on the business.

Over time, as organizations mature their journey-centric design approach, they will establish a foundation for more-advanced journey-centric customer data analysis. With end-to-end journey analytics, organizations will be poised to leverage AI solutions to personalize journey experiences.

AI-driven journey analytics and orchestration tools are evolving quickly. These tools will help us analyze historical behavioral trends for key customer journeys. Thus, we will be well-positioned to understand the needs of different customer segments and learn which interactions, content, and behaviors affect business outcomes.

These tools will also allow us to predict customers’ needs in real time as they progress through these journeys and dynamically orchestrate how the journey is delivered to improve business outcomes.

Journey analytics and AI-based orchestration are not a replacement for thoughtful user-centered design. You can’t fix poor experiences through orchestration alone. These tools require a significant investment in technology integration and data modeling. They should be seen as a supplement to journey-centric operations.

How to get about the journey-centric design in fintech?

This is all fine but how exactly do all this? The answers are just ahead…

You need to understand your customer. Simple as that. You can do it through anticipatory design, discovery phase, or personalized insights.

Ask yourself a few simple questions:

  • Who is my customer? It all starts with recognizing that different people have different needs, desires, and expectations when engaging with an organization. A new employee will likely need more hand-holding during the performance review process than his more tenured colleagues. A college student may be willing to extensively explore self-help options to solve a problem, whereas an older customer may want to reach a human agent right away.

So, before you can start thinking about someone’s specific journey, you first need to understand who exactly this person is. One particularly valuable tool for developing this understanding is customer and employee personas.

  • What is this person’s goal? People don’t interact with an organization simply for the joy of engaging with it. They interact with an organization because they are trying to achieve some broader, personal goal, and the path of reaching that goal just happens to intersect with the business somewhere along the way.
  • What were this person’s previous steps? What steps does the person take? What avenues are already explored? What type of emotions or attitudes did he or she bring from these previous experiences? Often, these prior interactions will include people and brands outside your organization.

For example, if a candidate is applying for a position with your firm, he’s probably researched the company, discussed the job with friends and family, and explored similar roles at other organizations. Once you’ve answered the question of what the person likely did right before, ask and answer it at least two more times.

  • What will be this person’s next steps? Interacting with your app is rarely going to be the final step on someone’s journey. But you can help them reach their ultimate objective more easily by considering what they are likely to do right after they engage with you.

Again, these subsequent interactions may include people and brands outside your company. Thinking about this question will help you recognize where there are opportunities to help smooth the person’s path forward.

  • What would satisfy your customer?  Rather than aiming to simply satisfy people’s basic needs, think about what it will take to create the most positive experience possible for this individual given what you know about who they are and what journey they are on. “Happy” here is a proxy for whichever emotion your company is trying to evoke during this particular interaction.

Top fintechs focused on customer-centric solutions

Smart Pension. This rapidly scaling app from the UK is revolutionizing the approach to pensions in England and abroad. The platform offers automatic pension schemes based on a defined contribution plan, handling the whole process through a digital platform. 

Zego. The app offers flexible insurance products that adapt to the working habits of the gig economy. By allowing customers to pay for insurance only when they need it, Zego demonstrates an understanding of modern work patterns and customer desires for flexibility and fairness.

Tractable. A very interesting, AI-based fintech. Tractable uses artificial intelligence to accelerate car insurance claims processes, reducing waiting times and the administrative burden on claimants. This focus on speeding up and simplifying claims handling greatly enhances customer satisfaction during stressful periods.

Monzo. Monzo caters to modern banking users with features that offer complete control over financial activities, such as instant spending notifications, budgeting tools, and savings pots. Their customer-centric model focuses on community feedback to continuously improve and tailor their services to meet user demands.

Railsr (formerly Railsbank) allows businesses to create bespoke financial products through its Banking-as-a-Service platform, focusing on the end-user’s experience and needs. By enabling brands to tailor their offerings, Railsr supports a deep integration of customer-centric practices into financial products.

Contact us for the creation of unforgettable experiences!

At Code & Pepper, we have 17+ years of experience in fintech, digital banking, and healthtech. We know how the sausage is made and throw additional pepper on it to smooth the taste for your users.

We integrate AI tools to accelerate the process of software development. We hire only the top 1.6% of market talents to work on your projects. With the help of a unique and tested talent identification methodology. Do you want to see how it works? Contact us, let’s tackle customer-centric design together.