An excellent digital experience is more important for the financial services industry than ever before, especially for financial advisors and their traditional, face-to-face way of doing business. Nowadays, more than 70% of customers expect businesses to leverage technology in new ways to provide them abetter experience. Younger customers especially are showing increased interest in tech-enabled solutions and services to meet their financial needs.
Without a seamless and versatile digital experience, your business may miss out on additional conversions and would-be customers. You are also at risk of losing your current customers to competitors that are emphasizing technology and investing in their online presence. In this article, we will explain the benefits of amplifying your digital experience and some helpful tips on how to do it.
Why Digital Experience Matters
Everyone has had poor experiences with technology and customer service. Whether that’s being put on hold when calling support or a web page not loading correctly, any barriers stopping a customer from solving an issue as quickly as possible will sour their opinion of a product or service. Ensuring your customers save time across your digital ecosystem is essential.
It’s also important to consider how your digital experience will affect the buyer’s journey. From helping prospects discover your services to guiding them towards making a purchase, the conversion process is difficult even for financial services firms with an excellent digital footprint. Businesses should prioritize making this process as simple and easy as possible for eager customers.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, having a great digital experience is an incredible competitive advantage. Your business may have exceptional services to offer but without a proper way of delivering it to clients and helping them succeed, many will look elsewhere. Especially in markets where your services are similar to your competitors, customer experience is often the determining factor in whether you lose a customer or secure a loyal one for the long haul.
How to Improve Your Digital Experience
Enhancing your business’s digital presence is a gradual process and may seem overwhelming if you try to do too much at once. As previously mentioned, new technologies are emerging every day and no company will ever stay completely up to date. However, there are a few major improvements you can make at any time to enhance your digital experience.
Optimize Your Mobile Experience
For starters, ensuring that both your regular website and your mobile website work properly is key. Recent analytics from Google show that visitors are much more likely to become customers when both your mobile site and your apps are easy to use and tailored to their needs.
Most website-building platforms offer the ability to view and edit your mobile site, and even if you’re not directly involved in building the site, make sure you give your designers feedback on both site experiences.
Consolidate Consumer Portals
One of the worst digital experience mistakes businesses make is relying on multiple customer portals. Consolidating your systems with an authenticated, single sign-on solution will allow your customers to access their account information, schedule a meeting, submit a support ticket and more with a single log in. This might take some behind-the-scenes configuration of your systems with the help of APIs, but achieving this outcome is easier than you might think and makes all the difference when it comes to user experience.
Intuitive design
Conducting user testing to identify parts of your website and mobile apps that could be improved upon is a great starting point to achieve a great design and user flow. Your website might seem intuitive to you because you were directly involved in creating it. However, data analytics generated from your web traffic activity will give you the best understanding of what aspects of your website are intuitively designed and which need improvement.
Site Heatmaps can give you a great idea of what content is engaging with your web audience and where you might be losing people due to poor design or irrelevant copy.These solutions are extremely convenient to install on your site and offer valuable data across your key pages. We recommend Hotjar due to its comprehensive features and freemium plans.
The ultimate goal for your digital ecosystem is to have such an intuitive design that your customers don’t even have to think about it. This takes work, but can be accomplished in time.
Key Takeaways
Creating a solid digital experience for your customers is crucial for the growth of your business. It can be easy to neglect customer-facing assets when your company is growing, but investing in a solid digital presence early on will pay off in the long run.
Building the kind of digital experience that impacts revenue growth takes time and resources, but it can be accomplished with a bit of help. We believe that creating a strong digital foundation with a seamlessly integrated tech stack improves the customer experience. Contact us to see how Strong CRM can help your business save time and money so you can focus on serving your customers.