The financial services landscape has changed drastically over the past decade, now embracing a broad range of online services, mobile device applications, and other innovations that complement and in some cases even replace the traditional ‘brick and mortar’ customer experience. This sea change has impacted the way that customers interact with their financial institutions and partners. As a result, both the nature of the customer experience—and the factors that influence customer satisfaction for financial services providers—are part of an ongoing transformation.

CFI Group works with a wide range of financial services and insurance firms to help them understand their customers’ experiences and take insightful actions to improve business performance. From smaller regional credit unions to huge multinational banking powerhouses, CFI Group delivers services and platform tools based on the proven science of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to help financial services clients create more satisfied customers, grow revenues, and improve bottom line results.

Case 1: Regional Bank – Products and Services Growth

The bank was facing growing competitive pressures in a ‘do more with less’ business environment. The VP and team had nothing other than anecdotal customer feedback to drive the bank’s evaluation of various internal product proposals, and they feared making the wrong investment decisions based on poor insights.

CFI Group’s analysis allowed the bank to confidently make three product and customer service investment decisions with highly predictable ROI and impact on deposit levels. A 1% increase in customer satisfaction index (CSI) accurately predicted a 1% increase in deposits for the bank’s most valuable wealth management customers. The bank also leveraged its deeper customer insights to initiate a best practices program to help underperforming branches, and shifted its focus to faster-growing geographies.

Case 2: Financial Services Firm – Improve Customer Loyalty

The VP had no way to accurately quantify the impact of his firm’s individual service providers on overall customer loyalty and propensity to engage other services.

After the recommendations were implemented, customer use of additional products/services increased by over 30% and overall customer retention improved by 5% year-over-year. The bank’s stock performance also improved dramatically vs. the S&P 500 Index.

Case 3: Large Multinational Bank – Improve Customer Retention and Market Share

The executive team had poor visibility into employee and client perceptions at the branch level, leading to uncertainty about the best path forward.

The bank went from being unprofitable to one of the most profitable in the region, driven by best-in-class levels of employee satisfaction and customer focus. The program with CFI Group has since been expanded to accommodate key mergers and acquisitions. CFI Group also now facilitates workshops to ensure that local branch managers understand how to apply customer insights to make business decisions that drive financial performance.

Case 4: B2B Financial Services – Increase Share of Wallet

The VP lacked specifics about which B2B client characteristics were the best determinants of higher volume potential, and how high-potential clients would respond to improvements in key satisfaction drivers.

CFI Group’s approach revealed that a 1% increase in customer satisfaction drove a .86% increase in volumes—in this case approximately $0.5 billion. This allowed the client to develop business cases for all initiatives based on expected return from increased satisfaction. The company developed marketing and sales strategies based on customer ‘lifecycle’ stages, refined offerings and customer service initiatives for high-potential customers, and developed integrated benchmarks for service excellence tied to bonus structures.