Council Post: Seven Blind Spots That Threaten The Success Of Digital Banking Products

Alex Kreger, UX Strategist & Founder of UX design agency UXDA, which helps banking & fintech brands with the financial UX methodology.

How would you react if your company spent half a million dollars and two years developing a new app and, after launching it, customer satisfaction decreased? There are several nonobvious factors that can completely sabotage all of the huge investments and efforts taken to create a digital experience in banking or fintech.

There’s no doubt that a great customer experience (UX/CX) is mandatory to retain a competitive edge in the digital world. Despite that, the efforts to improve UX/CX do not always lead to success due to certain critical blind spots. Failure is inherent to any project, regardless of the budget size or the efforts of the team. 

How can you identify and avoid these blind spots in time to protect the success of expensive, large-scale digitization projects?

Why UX/CX Efforts Can Fail

In the past decade, a huge amount of research has been carried out confirming the influence of CX on a company’s market efficiency. If negative CX leads to multiple business problems, then positive CX increases referrals, retention rates and revenue because 86% of customers are ready to pay more for a better customer experience, according to Oracle. 

The main reason why CX efforts don’t always bring the expected results can be explained by the “experience gap,” which is the negative difference between customers’ expectations and the experience they get from a financial digital service. If the experience is significantly worse than expected, it can have many unpleasant consequences, like decreased customer loyalty, negative reviews and even customers dropping the brand. 

The Experience Gap In Action

Several years ago, a known and respectable Central European bank embarked on a voluminous digital transformation journey. The bank’s outdated application had a rating of 3.5 stars. In order to digitalize and improve the competitive chances in the growing digital market, management launched a new, modern-looking banking application. The set design and development period was six months. 

The bank ended up spending three times as much time building the new application. Judging by the scope of the project, the improvements made and the timeline, the overall costs were estimated to be half a million dollars. However, the result did not live up to expectations. After the new application was released, its rating decreased to 2.4 stars and kept dropping, even a year after its first release.

How could this happen if the bank’s team worked hard for almost two years to improve the user experience?

The Seven Types Of Experience Gaps

The following are the blind spots in one or several of the seven experience gap levels in the financial organization: 

1. The culture gap: The lack of customer-centricity in a company’s culture prevents employees from bringing a service closer to customer expectations. The processes and activities that contribute to customer-centricity aren’t prioritized, and resources aren’t allocated to them.

2. The feedback gap: There is a lack of data about customer expectations and their experiences, or a company is collecting data but not acting upon it to solve user problems.

3. The design gap: This shows poor design execution. If user-centered product design is not a priority, decisions and efforts to create the final product and service are low quality and inefficient. 

4. The execution gap: This is formed from incompetent design and poor methodology. 

5. The value gap: The design ecosystem does not comply with user expectations. 

6. The gap of overpromising: Promising something that the product cannot provide leads to higher disappointment in user expectations. 

7. The emotional gap: If brand communication is purely informational, focused on functional features, an emotional connection with users cannot be formed. 

Bridging The Experience Gaps

Each client unconsciously evaluates the service they receive according to their expectations. The emotions caused by the quality of UX form the brand’s reputation. Digital channels have become the main marketing and PR of the brand. A negative experience with a mobile application can sabotage all brand promotion efforts. That’s why it’s so important to bridge these seven experience gaps that might arise when creating digital products.

1. Bridging the culture gap: The transformation begins with top management adopting a customer-centered experience mindset and spreading this influence throughout the values of the company. 

2. Bridging the feedback gap: In the banking example, the first step to bridging the gap is to dive deep into the most common complaints shared on social media and customer support calls. If a company is open to hearing critiques, it can use this data to bridge the gap and improve agility.

3. Bridging the design gap: A Design Pyramid framework bridges the execution gap by determining the five levels at which design integration will significantly increase a company’s efficiency: the process, the team, the actions, the results and the value.

4. Bridging the execution gap: Financial UX design methodology provides a step-by-step system for designing digital financial products that bridge the design gap and improve customer satisfaction. 

5. Bridging the value gap: Creation of true value and customer benefit can be implemented through the five levels of the value pyramid: functionality, usability, aesthetics, status and mission.

6. Bridging the gap of overpromising: Digital-age customers demand transparency, care, honesty and open communication. We must make promises that can be fulfilled and even exceeded.

7. Bridging the emotional gap: Empathy toward customers is critical. Building an emotional connection between the brand and its clients will ensure long-term loyalty and demand.

This connection is built through all of the aforementioned stages: a customer-centered mindset; making improvements based on feedback; using the right tools and methodology to create product design and the ecosystem; creating true value and benefit; and being honest and overdelivering on promises.

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