We are in a digital age of consumption. Just one social media post in a few minutes can completely overturn the attitude towards a brand, propel it into the world’s financial leaders, or destroy it without the possibility of recovery. To gain a foothold in the consumer’s mind, companies must be obsessed with customers.

What does it mean to be customer-obsessed, and how this popular way of managing customer relationships can nowadays affect fintech companies?

Customer obsession is an internal business strategy that involves a reasonable effort to focus on customers to increase their lifetime value.

Every day, more and more traditional financial companies follow the path of modern startups and become digital, focusing their strategy, operations, and budgets on better understanding, and interacting with customers. Facing this trend, FinTech companies will be able to innovate processes, provide effective services and offerings while remaining relevant in today’s competitive world.

Customer obsession is important for many reasons. It directs a laser beam of customer engagement and creates a new consumer experience that far exceeds their expectations, increases the frequency of purchases and, as a result, creates business benefits.

Benefits of customer obsession and digitalization for FinTech

  • Effective goals and positioning. Forming a fundamentally new customer experience and building a future-oriented financial company.
  • New products that are simple and clear for customers. Implementation of fully standardized and customized lines.
  • Improving the digital sales process. Simplifying operations and service processes based on customer feedback.
  • “Seamless” service. Using technology for transferring customers to online channels to identify and effectively resolve service issues.
  • Changing the operating model. Building Agile teams, focused not on products, but on the convenience of customer interaction.
  • Use of analytics. Applying Agile methods to all projects, for cross-selling, personalizing products and setting prices.

To create a client-centered culture, management must make the needs and expectations of customers a priority for the entire business by implementing a business strategy based on treating customers as individuals.

Qualities of customer obsession

Empathy

Empathize with your customers and view things from their perspective.

Respect

Provide friendly and prompt service. This lets customers know that the company treats them with respect and is willing to meet their needs.

Simplicity

Invest in customer service to create an easy experience.

Communication

Be frank and honest in your communication, it will help the client understand his value from the company’s point of view.

Customer focus

True customer obsession is not limited to the customer service department. Improve customer orientation in all departments, as they are all part of creating the customer experience.

Using these core principles, companies can create the “ideal” path to the customer and gain an advantage in the fast-growing FinTech market.

Only companies obsessed with customers will be able to move forward in today’s world. To do so, they need to create a “system of understanding” that combines a customer-centric mentality with technology to harness ideas and consistently turn data into effective action.

Gaining access to digital technology and customer obsession is not an easy process, requiring a rapid reboot aimed at improving data availability and analysis and including the implementation of the latest technology with highly skilled personnel.

5 Steps to Create a Customer-Centered Culture

Here’s what you can start doing today to become a successful and relevant financial institution:
Step 1. Define your vision for the future and plan. First, you need to define your digitalization goals. Partnering with IT companies with relevant experience in implementing innovative products will help you achieve them.
Step 2. Build the right team. You can’t succeed alone. Recruit staff who understand and support your mission.

  • Hiring. Learn how to find and hire talented people to help you achieve goals and always take care of customers’ needs.
  • Adaptation. To be attentive to customers, even the most experienced support professionals need to learn the specifics of your company. Proper adaptation is critical.
  • Management. Customer service is a long process with constantly shifting expectations and improving support tools, so proper management is the key.

Step 3. Faster development of the service. Customer loyalty depends on usability, simple design and an intuitive process for buying financial products.
Step 4. Invest in technologies. Agile development methods and IT architecture components must be implemented to accelerate new products to market. Customer data should be the most important motivator in decision-making.
Step 5. Innovate. Encourage customer feedback, measure data and actions based on it, and never stop improving.