Designing Simple and Customer-Friendly Digital Services in Banking & Insurance
Every year, technology makes the world more complex for people to understand. So, easy-to-use digital services and applications are in particularly high demand. This is even more true for the financial services industry, since services such as banking, insurance are an important part of people’s lives. Moreover, there has always been a thought process in the financial services industry, specially banking to abide by the rule that ‘more is better.’ Unfortunately, this approach more often than not leads to development and implementation of services that are anything but customer friendly. Every year financial services providers lose billions of dollars in prospective loses owing to cases such as digital services being too complex for the customer, design of the services overwhelming the customer and also being unable to guide the customer through the set processes and more. All of these points towards a clear fact that financial services providers such as banks, insurance companies can get a huge advantage by delivering a perfect user experience based on a simple interface.
Simplicity Principles
It’s a commonly accepted fact that simplicity is inherent to our perception about the things around us and the world as a whole. Financial services providers should always remember and focus on this aspect while implementing digital services. To elaborate further, let’s have a look at some simplicity principles ideally suited for banks, insurance companies and the overall financial services industry.
- Predictability – First and foremost amongst simplicity principles is predictability. Predictability basically means that the digital services and solutions offered to the customers should be easily anticipable, i.e. answers to the questions on how and where which a customer is looking for from digital services should be obvious.
- Control – It is essential for a user to have a sense of control over the situation as it gives him/her confidence. If there are too many elements not allowing to quickly build a clear mental model, panic ensues. Control reduces the potential for error and the cognitive pressure, which is especially important while using digital services for financial aspects such as banking, insurance etc.
- Ease of Usage – Users generally act upon the principle of least resistance. To put it simply, they do what is easier and choose what is clearer. So, a good financial interface should be very simple, providing the user with smooth and obvious user flows. This leads to high user satisfaction.
How Financial Services Providers Can Keep the Design of Digital Services Simple
Now coming to the major issue of how financial services providers such as banks, insurance companies can keep the design of their digital services simple and thus user friendly, thereby enhancing customer experience. Although there are numerous verticals which companies should improve upon, but to sum it up in a few major points that are common for all markets, financial service providers should focus on,
- Avoiding too Many Elements in Design (over density) – Its an old adage that ‘Over density’ is the worst enemy of great design. Too many elements will frustrate the user and ruin the customer experience. An important point to note here is that over density relates not only to the number of elements, but also to the diversity of their visual characteristics. The impression of multiple colors and multiple shapes more often than not ends up creating a sense of chaos.
- Step by Step Tasks – When a digital service requires some action from the user, it is better to divide the service into step-by-step tasks instead of taking it all into one screen. This should help to manage user attention and also ensure that it doesn’t overwhelm the user.
- Focus on Familiarity – Both desktop solutions and mobile applications have already developed standards for interface solutions. They are related to user habits and accelerate the learning curve. Financial services providers such as banks, insurance companies should avoid ignoring traditional usage patterns of customers while designing digital services as it can often lead to failure.
- Manage and Improve Critical Touchpoints – Explore the user’s journey through the digital service and focus on improving key touchpoints that have a high probability of frustrating the user.
- Consistency –Ideally the user should not have a feeling of diversity while he/she is using a digital service. The flow of the digital service should feel smooth and connected to the user.
Improving Chat and Voice Digital Assistants
Voice-enabled digital assistants are increasingly becoming commonplace in the financial services industry. These assistants have immense potential to keep customers engaged and feel seen and listened to and heard — and go way beyond the basic use cases such as asking, “What’s my balance?” or “What was my last transaction?”. All of this points towards the fact that financial services companies should start investing to make their chat and voice digital assistants more useful and customer centric. Improving voice and chat digital assistants has the potential of ensuring effective 24/7 customer support, more proactive customer interaction, optimum monitoring of customer data, gaining insights and better lead generation. To improve digital assistants, banks, insurance companies should focus on some critical factors. Let’s have a look at them in the next section.
Critical Factors in Improving Chat and Voice Digital Assistants
- Find the right balance between human and AI interactions to drive greater customer engagement.
- Equip digital assistants with additional features, such as images/videos etc.
- Develop talent along three key areas: experience design, architecture/technology and legal/compliance.
- Focus on gaining consumer trust by solving consumer pain points and being contextually relevant when selecting use cases for conversational assistants.
Mistakes to Avoid
- Focusing way too much on the technology part, but much less on the application part. Deployment, and understanding the environment the chat and voice digital assistants are being deployed in, are the keys to success.
- Each digital assistant gets better if it is trained properly. And that sometimes doesn’t happen because financial services providers don’t have the patience to let the person(s) who developed the digital assistant work on making it better.
- Banks and insurance companies are sometimes on the overcautious side while implementing voice and chat assistants, leading to what can only be termed as halfhearted attempts.
- Ignoring the need to build personnel skill sets with conversational interfaces such as chat and voice assistants.
Improved Chat and Voice Digital Assistants Can Immensely Benefit Banks and Insurance Companies
Let’s have a look at how effective chat and voice assistants can help financial services providers such as banks and insurance companies in all aspects of their business, right from enhancing customer experience to better operational efficiency.
