Prashant Choudhari, Head of Marketing at Fino Payments Bank, discusses the bank’s use of design thinking across various touchpoints, including merchant partner education, customer interviews and surveys:
Ravi Lalwani: For maximizing CX, what design elements are usually the most difficult or demanding? How are you tackling that challenge?
Prashant Choudhari: In our context, 3 major elements significantly impact CX but are challenging to implement:
a) Personalization – Delivering individualized experiences is a complex task, especially as the customer base expands, leading to increased complexity.
b) Omni-channel Consistency – With a growing number of channels, ensuring consistent omni-channel experiences becomes increasingly difficult.
c) Emotional Engagement – Customers are more likely to trust a brand if they are emotionally engaged. The challenge for a bank lies in building emotional connections in a transaction-led business.
Fino Payments Bank has invested in marketing technology tools and technologies to provide a high degree of personalization and consistency in its services. To improve their processes continually, we follow a ‘Design → Launch → Improve → Design’ cycle. Our focus on creating meaningful moments during transactions that matter to customers to build emotional engagement. Even in the smallest transactions, we prioritize delivering exceptional service to their customers. Since expectations are constantly changing, maintaining momentum is crucial.
Give some examples of how you have enhanced the CX impact by fine-tuning words, colors, sounds, tone, etc.
Fino has integrated several key phrases such as ‘Fino Matlab Fikar Not,’ ‘Har din Fino,’ and ‘Fino Hamesha’ into its communication. These phrases convey our commitment to both customers and merchant partners.
How extensively do you use A/B testing to improve CX? Is the use of A/B testing going up or down?
Our communication with Fino’s customers and merchant partners, especially through martech tools, includes a control group where we measure responses from the test group against those from the control group. We are nearly fanatical about following the rigor of test v control groups. It has worked very well for us.
Personalization has emerged as a very powerful customer relationship approach. Give 2 or 3 examples of personalization that have been efficient and effective for the customer and the organization.
Fino Bank has been at the forefront of technology investment, delivering personalized experiences. With a large on-ground sales team and nearly a million merchant partners, we are developing a mobile platform to empower frontline personnel. This platform will enable them to assess each merchant partner’s performance, identify key pain points, initiate discussions, and utilize various other tools to deliver immediate solutions tailored to each situation.
Furthermore, Fino has introduced a women’s account, providing identity to a significant portion of the population. This digital account, offering substantial rewards, has been well-received by customers.
The bank is progressing towards a ‘segment of one’ approach by increasing focus on analytics and technology. During acquisition campaigns, using profiling information such as handset, has yielded better conversions.
Have there been differences of opinion between technology experts and business experts as to the roadmap for CX improvement? How were the differences resolved?
Some differences we encounter include prioritization, scheduling, and risk tolerance. To resolve such disparities, we ensure our decisions are data-driven. Analytics assist teams in understanding the potential impact on CX and business outcomes. Adopting a design thinking approach enables both teams to define, develop, test, and implement solutions for key pain points.
How are you using design thinking to improve CX?
The design thinking approach has been implemented across multiple touch points. As a bank, Fino educates its merchant partners about various products and empowers them with financial tools. Fino has launched Gyankosh, a go-to resource library for all merchant partners. Additionally, the bank regularly conducts interviews and surveys with customers to understand their needs, pain points, and behaviors. This aids in creating empathy maps to derive insights and define problem statements for resolution.
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