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 The bank’s outdated application had a rating of 3.5 stars.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 methodologyprovides 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.
Analysis
This article does a great job explaining why customer/user experience is so crucial to the banking experience. The better the UX, the higher the chance that the user will remain loyal. The most successful companies are known for their quality customer experience. In order to remain relevant, companies need to always be evolving and improving how they treat their customers, giving them the best service possible. Because the moment a better interface comes along, they’ll be gone. UX (or CX, as it’s called in this article) is fairly easy to misinterpret, which is why certain gaps in experience need to constantly be reconsidered and addressed to match the current market. Clients come into an experience with expectations, and whether or not that service meets or exceeds their expectations influences whether or not they will return. My biggest takeaway from this article is that the best UX comes from looking at things through the user’s points of view, being open to user critiques, and being willing to evolve at any time.
Source
Kreger, A. (2020, December 8). Council post: Seven blind spots that threaten the success of digital banking products. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2020/12/09/seven-blind-spots-that-threaten-the-success-of-digital-banking-products/?sh=26a308cf2899
