Truth be told, digital customer experience is no longer a brand-new trend. Open everyone’s agenda and you’ll find it there, top position, for years now.

Considering every firm had to adhere to it somehow, sometime, the point is now to assess whether they are satisfied with it or not, what they are planning to do and where they are planning to invest to improve it. This is what we asked Wealth and Investment managers via our latest survey on CX, along with a few more interrogatives aiming to outline recent trends and how to reap the benefits.

An inside look at the market in terms of Customer Experience

Straight to the point, digital customer experience is confirmed as an ever-present priority as part of a broader digital transformation strategy. There are a number of reasons to this: it promotes higher revenues and customer base growth (24%), it contributes to improve customer success metrics (24%) and reduces operational costs for customer service (20%).

However, according to our survey, only 10% of respondents are highly confident in the effectiveness of their current digital CX while the majority feel that much work is still to be done. Fair enough, as improving customer experience is not a one-time task, but rather a dynamic process which requires increasing attention and monitoring of evolving customer needs along with collective efforts to build a customer-first culture.

Challenges remain, but wealth managers are raising to them

Four emerged from our survey as the main barriers firm face in implementing effective digital experiences. These are: limited staff expertise, outdated technology, budget and time constraints. Therefore, internally, businesses may need to spend in training, technology upgrades, and effective processes to handle the threat of these challenges becoming issues and maximize the use of their resources . Externally, investments to improve customer experience will be certainly increasing. Our survey reveals the top areas of investment, being Customer Data management and Data Integration – selected by the majority of respondents – Microservices and API development (23%), mobile apps or mobile touch points (15%), analytics and dashboarding (15%).

These investments suggest a focus on improving the customer experience by utilising customer data effectively through management and integration with other data sources, building microservices and APIs for development and deployment, creating mobile apps for customer engagement, and implementing analytics and dashboards for data visualisation and decision-making. The goal is likely to provide customers with personalised and seamless interactions across different touchpoints and channels, and to gain insights into customer behaviour and preferences to inform future business decisions.

In terms of tools used within firms’ customer experience ecosystems, CRM climbs the ranks, recognised by a winning 45% majority of respondents as the key tool for companies looking to improve the overall customer experience: it allows for automation and streamline of customer-facing processes, as well as gaining a more complete view of their customers by collecting and analysing customer data.

Looking at the most popular tools to be introduced in the next years there is a desire to deliver a more sophisticated digital experience, with a digital experience platform and a customer experience management software (25%) both having similar scores. Next comes a customer data platform (20%) that creates a comprehensive customer database accessible by other systems to analyse, track and manage customer data. The need for a digital experience platform includes also an opti-channel dynamic portal with personalised interaction with customer.

This is consistent with the result that half of the organisations surveyed are planning to replace, upgrade or introduce a new platform and apps to generate leads, engage with prospects, provide actionable insights and improve the overall customer experience by providing a consistent and personalised experience across all digital touchpoints.

The story is clear, investing in technologies to provide for a value added and differentiated customer experience is not optional. Wealth & Investment Managers know this and now are acting on it.