.svg)
Building a Modern Customer Service Foundation for Financial Services
Customer service is often used interchangeably to describe customer experience. With good reason - service quality, especially in complex and highly regulated industries like banking and payments has an outsized impact on how clients view their customer experience. —customer service is no longer just about resolving issues. It’s about delivering consistent, orchestrated journeys across products, platforms, departments, and even third-party partners.
A strong customer service strategy is the foundation for doing this well. It enables teams to move beyond reactive support and deliver proactive, personalized experiences that reduce customer effort and increase loyalty. For financial institutions, it also protects against churn, complaints, and reputational risk.
Whether you're a bank rethinking how you handle onboarding, a payment provider improving servicing, or a credit union navigating complex partner ecosystems, this updated 101 guide covers what matters most today—and how to do it right.
1. Make Journey Visibility the Centerpiece of Your Strategy
Customers don't think in tickets. They think in outcomes.
To meet their expectations, support agents must be able to see the full picture of a customer’s experience: where they are in the journey, what steps have already been completed, what obstacles exist, and who else is involved.
Unfortunately, many banks and providers still operate in silos. A 2024 OvationCXM survey found that 56% of business customers interact with 2–3 departments to resolve a single issue, and 92% are asked to repeat information or documentation.
To reduce effort and improve experience, customer service teams need access to unified journey data—not just CRM entries or ticket logs. That visibility enables better handoffs, faster resolution, and greater trust.
2. Design Support Around the Full Journey, Not Just the Touchpoint
Support doesn’t begin when a ticket is opened or a call is made. It begins when a customer sets out to achieve something—open an account, activate a card, process payments, integrate tools.
Modern customer service strategies recognize this and build support experiences that align to full journeys. That means:
- Mapping the end-to-end customer process
- Identifying all stakeholders (internal and external)
- Understanding common pain points and delays
- Proactively resolving known friction
- Coordinating actions across departments and partners
And the data shows it matters:
Just 65% of those onboarding merchant services products said it was mostly easy. Even fewer Treasury Management customers felt that way, with only about half reporting a mostly easy onboarding experience.
When service is designed this way, the customer feels guided and supported. When it’s not, they feel lost—and that’s when abandonment happens.
3. Prioritize Responsiveness with Technology that Orchestrates
Responsiveness is still one of the top drivers of customer satisfaction. But in complex service environments, it’s not enough to respond quickly—you have to respond effectively.
The OvationCXM Business Banking CX Report found that more than 40% of respondents needed to contact their financial institution multiple times to resolve an issue, and 1 in 4 abandoned onboarding altogether when delays or confusion set in.
That kind of breakdown happens when agents lack the tools to:
- View the entire journey and customer history in real time
- Collaborate across departments or external partners
- Automatically trigger the next step in a journey
- Receive intelligent prompts or next-best actions
AI-powered tools can help triage issues, auto-fill data, and ensure the right agent sees the right issue at the right time. But those tools only work when built on a foundation of real-time, aggregated journey data.
According to McKinsey, companies that deploy AI-driven service journeys can reduce service costs by up to 40% and improve customer satisfaction by 30%.
4. Create Internal Playbooks, Automations and Knowledge
When support teams operate without guidance, inconsistencies can emerge. One agent might offer a refund immediately; another might escalate. One team might handle onboarding follow-ups; another lets them lapse.
A strong customer service strategy includes clear playbooks: structured steps, defined escalation paths, communication templates, and service standards.
Great playbooks are not static PDFs—they are embedded in your systems, triggered by data, and visible to all journey participants.
Layering in AI-powered automation can streamline common actions: status updates, file maintenance, communications, next-steps, escalations and reminders. Add knowledge bases to ensure agents can resolve issues without chasing down product documentation or waiting on internal SMEs. With journey context and knowledge in hand, teams can resolve issues faster and more consistently.
Service teams are tasked with solving customer issues quickly and accurately. To do that, they need tools that surface needed information at the right times, reduce uncertainty, and minimize time spent hunting for solutions. A strong strategy gives them that clarity, structure, and support.
Increasingly, businesses are also embracing AI to simplify task completion. In fact, 60% of business banking customers say they are comfortable using AI support for banking needs, according to the OvationCXM Business Banking CX Report.
Source: https://www.ovationcxm.com/blog/business-banking-cx-report
That means expectations are evolving—and organizations that combine real-time data, AI, and automation can meet those expectations while improving operational efficiency.
5. Use Real-Time Data and AI to Uncover Customer Satisfaction
Voice of the customer (VOC) programs are critical. But in isolation, they often lag behind. By the time you receive a low NPS score or a complaint, the damage may already be done.
Modern customer service strategies use real-time, aggregated data across journeys—combined with AI—to:
- Detect early signs of friction
- Identify patterns in delays or drop-off
- Surface outliers that traditional VOC misses
- Pinpoint cross-functional or third-party gaps
Customer feedback is a piece of this larger puzzle; it just can't be the sole source of decision-making. It's more powerful when paired with behavioral data in context of the full journey across steps, teams and partners.
6. Upskill and Empower Support Teams with Tools and Training
The traditional advice was to hire capable, empathetic, customer-facing staff. That's still true, but with the advent of AI and how it's fueling highly personalized experiences in all parts of life, financial institutions have to rethink how to support their internal teams with information, training and upskilling to maximize the value of emerging technology.
Modern reality: Financial institutions can't always hire highly technical talent for support roles—nor should they have to. Instead, the focus should be on upskilling existing teams and equipping them with tools that amplify their ability to serve customers.
Support teams need training that goes beyond product features. They need to understand how the journeys work, what systems are involved, and what other teams or partners may be part of the experience. Just as important, they need access to platforms that surface customer context, recommend next steps, and automate complex workflows.
AI plays a key role here—bridging knowledge gaps, surfacing insights, and guiding agents through unfamiliar scenarios. When paired with strong foundational training and journey visibility, AI and orchestration tools help even less-technical team members deliver expert-level service.
Instead of expecting agents to be experts in every tool or process, give them a system that brings clarity, automation, and insight to every customer interaction.
Final Thoughts: What a Modern Customer Service Strategy Requires
Customer service today must be:
- Journey-aware, not ticket-based
- Data-informed, not siloed
- Coordinated, not fragmented
- Proactive, not reactive
- Integrated, not isolated from the broader ecosystem
This is especially true in industries like banking, where one interaction often involves five different systems and multiple service teams.
According to Forrester, 1 in 4 companies prioritizing CX improvement are creating cross-functional teams aligned to customer journeys.
Source: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/the-three-cx-priorities-for-2024/
Recommendations: What to Look for in a Modern CX Strategy Platform
While this guide isn’t about specific solutions, many of the strategies above are difficult to execute without the right infrastructure. If you’re evaluating platforms to support a modern service strategy, look for:
- Journey orchestration tools that connect steps across departments, systems, and third-party providers
- Unified customer interaction data that provides real-time visibility into each customer’s journey
- AI-powered insights and recommendations that help teams work more efficiently
- No-code workflow tools so operations and service leaders can adapt quickly to changing needs
- Integrations with your existing systems (CRM, core, ticketing, communications)
These capabilities empower support teams to deliver the kind of coordinated, personalized experiences customers now expect—and financial institutions need to retain them.
Want to explore how institutions are using journey orchestration to reduce onboarding abandonment, increase NPS, and streamline support? Read the Business Banking CX Report.
