Katy Thorbahn is partner, Managing Director at Shiny.
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Recently, I was isolated at home with Covid and, having exhausted much of my regular TV viewing, I stumbled across a movie I wanted to watch that somehow was not available on all the streaming platforms and channels to which I already subscribe. So with about two clicks, I became a customer of a new streaming service and was watching the movie minutes later.
It was quick, seamless and satisfying—and so unlike many potential customers’ experiences with financial services companies.
What I experienced was a really short “time to value.” In other words, the time it took for me to decide “I’m going to buy that” to enjoying what I bought—in this case, the movie. Streaming platforms have this down cold, and since many people living in the U.S. use those platforms every day, those experiences are raising expectations for how all brands shorten the time from choosing to using.
Buying financial services products is by definition more complicated than buying a movie. There is often underwriting involved and the need for specific information that may not be at everyone’s fingertips. But that doesn’t mean those involved in the category can’t find better ways. Apple, for example, has made it so you can apply for an Apple Card while you’re in line at the supermarket and use it to check out with your digital wallet by the time you get to the cashier. In the student loan space, we helped a client reduce the time to apply from 15 minutes to about three, all on a mobile device. It’s not as instantaneous an experience, but still pretty seamless and satisfying.
We know that in financial services, one of the moments when customer satisfaction is highest is the moment they first become a customer. If you can compress your time to value and enable your customer to use your product even faster, your opportunity to raise that satisfaction goes up significantly. Here are three ways to help you speed up your time to value:
1. Imagine how you’d construct your acquisition experience if you were starting from scratch. This may seem like a waste of time, especially when you are working in a large organization with well-established legacy systems. But trying to innovate and improve through that lens can feel defeatist. If you remove those limitations and allow yourself and your team to imagine “what if?” you will often find a road map to improving the process and can begin implementing quick wins while building the necessary infrastructure for the larger wins. Working with an outside agency can help with this, as they will come without the mental shackles of what is possible now and can provide that third-party validation for new ideas that is often helpful for gaining the organizational commitment behind innovative solutions.
2. Treat people who apply like they’re already your customer, even if they aren’t yet approved. A lot of established credit card companies can’t provide the same instant approval experience as Apple. But that doesn’t mean they can’t improve what happens once someone submits an application in order to provide something of value. That could be additional information on the benefits of the card and the options for rewards redemption. Or it could be information on how to use the card to build and improve credit.
3. Strengthen the working relationship between marketing, product and legal/regulatory teams. I’ve seen numerous times over my career how the sooner and more integrated the legal team is, the more innovative programs can become. The legal team’s job is to protect the company from liability, and so without context and involvement in new ideas, it can be safer for the team to say it can’t be done. The marketing and product teams should be more proactive at bringing along their colleagues from the legal team so they have a greater understanding of the strategy and are looking for ways to implement them with the appropriate (but not overbearing) legal guardrails.
Think like a streaming platform and reduce your time to value. Then watch your customer satisfaction—and business results—grow.
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