About digital customer proximity at banks

In the future, banks will have to align their digital presence even more closely with the needs of customers and their desire for autonomy. This is shown by the recent benchmark study for banks in the German and Swiss markets conducted by Unic, leading provider of integrated e-business solutions.

Customer proximity and self-service offer

Emotional customer proximity continues to be one of the important differentiation tools and plays a decisive role as a success factor. Thus, banks must meet the increasing desire of customers to independently inform themselves about different options by driving the necessary digitalization of their own advisory offerings.

The big challenge for the industry is to make digital customer intimacy seamless and emotionally engaging on all three levels - customer experience, interactive services and mobile user journeys. Efforts with regard to digital customer proximity are clearly visible among the players, but there is still great potential for development among all of them.

"The digital channel has become a key stop on the customer journey," said Gerrit Taaks, chief market officer and partner at Unic.

"Many banks are looking for a way to address customers personally at this touchpoint as well. However, the mechanisms of trust building from the offline world cannot be transferred 1:1 to the digital world, which is why new ways are needed to establish customer proximity."

Real empathy about banks?

Visual design still represents a major challenge for many banks. Many players have already consistently implemented their CI/CD concept online, but they are not really able to address the customer personally. In addition, usability on various websites suffers from the many design elements used.

Thus, the German and Swiss banks do not manage to pick up the user and reach him emotionally. The exceptions to this are Migros Bank in Switzerland and Deutsche Bank and Hamburger Sparkasse in Germany, as they were the only ones who were able to convince in this point. Most companies have recognized the importance of mobile devices and have consistently implemented their visual design for all devices.

In terms of content design, many banks manage to digitally map well-structured and comprehensible content. However, many of them fail to take the step towards needs orientation: Instead of focusing on the added value of the content for the customer, the emphasis is placed on the promotion of products. The exception to this and a showcase example of successful content design is UBS Switzerland.

The navigation design is comprehensible at almost all of the banks examined and the content is well interlinked. However, there is room for improvement in the presentation of search results at many of them in order to make the variety of information clearer for customers. The Migros Bank and the BEKB in Switzerland as well as the Deutsche Bank and the Postbank in Germany are particularly convincing with a navigation design that meets expectations.

Optimisation potential

And the channel change, i.e. the transmission of the entered information to the bank for an advisory meeting, is also only possible seamlessly at half of the banks examined. The Raiffeisenbank in Switzerland was particularly convincing in this area. There is also great potential for optimisation in pension planning. Despite detailed explanations of the various options, the product view clearly dominates in this area - the customer's needs and benefits are not directly addressed and there is also a lack of forwarding of information to the bank.

Migros Bank has made the most progress in transforming its advisory processes to the website.

Direct contact options, such as instant chat or video advice, are only offered very cautiously by Swiss financial institutions in particular. In Germany, on the other hand, half of the banks already offer such direct contact. In order to cope with the increased use of mobile devices, many financial service providers have implemented a responsive website.

You can obtain the complete benchmark study here