Citizens Bank’s Beth Johnson: ‘Personal interaction remains important to customers’
- What bank clients expect from their institutions is changing, according a new Bank Experience Survey.
- Citizens Bank CXO Beth Johnson joins us to discuss the findings of the research and how it's impacting banking today and in the future.
Consumer behavior was already changing before COVID hit. When you ask financial services executives, many will tell you that COVID is acting to accelerate those trends.
Beth Johnson, chief experience officer at Citizens Bank, is studying those trends. Citizens recently published its inaugural Banking Experience Survey, which polled over 10,000 customers and 252 business leaders across the US on their views around digital banking. Beth joins us on the podcast to talk about the importance of marrying human interaction with technology within banking and how changes made in response to COVID will likely have lasting impact on financial services long after the pandemic is over.
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The following excerpts were edited for clarity.
The CXO role
I am the chief experience officer at Citizens Bank. And what that really means is I think about how we use customer experience to pull together our digital, our marketing, and our customer analytics to offer seamless experiences for our consumer and commercial customers to be ready to meet their needs going forward.
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The data on business customers is really interesting – 90% want a bank to help them through their lifecycles and 73% have changed the way they bank to be more digital. These are huge percentages and don’t bode well for the FIs that abandoned their SME clients with PPP loans. The vast majority of small businesses went with a new financial institution to get their loan (my company included) including community banks, smaller, regional banks and fintechs. Digital-only fintechs got a huge awareness and credibility boost overnight and this data suggests that they may be able to keep and grow this group of business clients.