Improve your customer experience with consistency

Consistency matters. Imagine a great mortgage experience at your local bank. The application is digital, your loan officer is friendly and helpful when you have questions, and the process is efficient. As far as you’re concerned, you’ve found your bank for life.

A few years later, when you apply for a home equity loan, your experience is something else entirely. The application isn’t digital. You encounter roadblocks along the way. Your loan officer isn’t nearly as helpful as the one who walked you through the mortgage process.

What felt like something lifelong now feels very replaceable. Chances are, you won’t be going back or referring anyone. Inconsistency has undone the positive experience that was the catalyst for your relationship.

Lenders often employ numerous point solutions, which may provide great individual interfaces but are frequently siloed, resulting in the application process for each product varying greatly. Tapping into the consistent, positive experiences across products provided by a Digital Lending Platform is an opportunity to delight at each financial milestone, building relationships for the long haul.

Providing an experience customers can trust

Celent analyst Craig Focardi, in his briefing note on enterprise lending systems, notes consistency as one of the three key areas of innovation for lenders. Focardi went so far as to challenge lenders directly to “provide a consistent digital customer engagement across the loan origination process for all retail products.”

A J.D. Power report helps explain why consistency is so important: “The ability to minimize customer problems and deliver consistently across all lines of business are among the keys to success in building that nationwide base of strong customer relationships.”

People find comfort in knowing what to expect. Disparate experiences can cause confusion, a lack of trust in the financial institution, and application abandonment. Customers likely want to feel as if they are engaging with one brand, not a set of disconnected offerings.

Fostering customer relationships

Eliminating inconsistencies — moving toward cohesive experiences across channels and products — evolves interactions from simple transactions into budding relationships. When customers are comfortable with your brand and the experience they know they can expect, trust can grow.

This means they’re more loyal to your brand. They’re more likely to come back to you for other needs, and they can even become brand ambassadors, passing on glowing reviews to friends and family. The value of referral networks is significant. According to Ellie Mae, 31% of homeowners chose their mortgage lender referral from a friend or family member.

Supporting consistency with a platform approach

As opposed to employing a collection of disjointed point solutions, lenders can utilize a Digital Lending Platform to offer consistent experiences across products. You can bring customers a sense of consistency by applying the same look and feel to each application, regardless of the product.

A platform allows you to incorporate other elements into each application that contribute to this unified experience, including avenues for assistance such as co-piloting, your institution’s branding, logos, and color schemes, and an intuitive user interface.

Harnessing the power of loyalty

Don’t risk losing customers to inconsistent experiences. Implementing a strategy to align application experiences can help increase conversion rates across product lines. Dive into our joint whitepaper with CBA SmartBrief where we discuss how you can improve cross-product consistency.