Banking's channel problem is really an accountability problem

Roughly 80% of customers say the most frustrating part of their banking experience is how disjointed it feels moving between touchpoints, cycling from app to branch to call centre with none of them appearing to talk to one another. If I had to point to the single biggest barrier behind that number, it would be the org chart rather than the technology. Most institutions still run separate teams, incentives, and scorecards for branches, digital, and phone, and that structure creates gaps in accountability precisely at the handoffs, where customers feel it most.

The channels themselves may be strong –  whether that's a slick mobile experience or a branch network that's thriving – but a transaction that begins online and finishes in a branch gets credited entirely to the branch, while the digital work that made that finish possible vanishes from anyone's scorecard. When a handoff's value is invisible, it's hard to justify investing in making it smoother, so the channels stay strong in isolation while drifting further apart in practice.

Years ago, we made a deliberate choice to invest in branches and digital at the same time, not as a hedge while we waited to see which one would win, but because we believed our customers would need both, often within a single transaction. We understood that simply offering several channels is not the same thing as offering one connected experience, and that our customers weren't asking for a digital relationship or a branch relationship so much as the freedom to choose between them without having to repeat themselves.  We still have work to do to fully deliver on that vision, but it continues to guide our approach: designing around the customer journey, building experiences once and delivering them more consistently wherever a customer chooses to engage with us.

Self-service and automation clearly have a role to play here too, though I'd resist the temptation to frame that role purely around cost reduction. A more useful question is whether a given interaction is a task or a decision. Routine tasks, checking a balance, making a payment, updating an address, tend to be well suited to automation, and customers generally prefer handling them quickly and on their own schedule. Decisions, like weighing a loan or working through a hardship, are better served by a person who can bring judgment and empathy to the moment. Done well, automation protects that human layer by freeing people up for the conversations where their expertise actually changes the outcome. That sorting only works, though, if the company already knows who it is dealing with and what happened the last time that customer got in touch.

Knowing who a customer is and actually following that understanding across every touchpoint are two different things, and closing that gap is why we are investing in building experiences once and delivering them consistently across channels. That way, customers spend less time repeating themselves and re-establishing context every time they switch how they engage with us. 

No amount of engineering fixes a problem that originates in how a company is structured. The institutions that close this gap will be the ones that stop managing channels and start managing journeys.