Customer Service in Banking Industry

According to the World Bank, 76% of the worldwide population has banking accounts — a significant increase since just a decade ago. The number of people with accounts grows as Millennials and Zoomers gain more financial power. With COVID-19, banking systems witnessed a significant increase in digital users, and the trend isn’t stopping anytime soon. However, navigating through a banking account and performing banking transactions isn’t an easy task for many. That’s why the need for customer support is becoming more pressing. 

What are the common pain points of customer service in banking, and what can you do to improve customer experience?

What Is Customer Service in Banking Systems

What do we mean by customer support in this industry? Customer service in banking is the assistance and support provided on all levels to customers throughout their interactions with financial institutions, whether offline or online. It covers everything — from answering inquiries about accounts to resolving fraud complaints — to contributing to better customer experience. The more diversified banking services become, the bigger is the demand for best supporters for fintech.

At their core, banking support services often focus on complex interactions where trust and swift solutions matter. This is what distinguishes them from other industries: it happens much more often due to how difficult financial tasks can become. Many users don’t know about the legal nuances of their operations or the limits of their financial transactions. These and other questions make regular assistance more pressing.

That’s why the key principles for customer service in banking are: 

• fast problem-solving
• responsiveness
• personalized approach
• trust and security

These principles create guidelines for what consultants can provide to users and how you can distinguish a specific company from its competitors. By prioritizing these principles, banks can enhance customer satisfaction, build long-term relationships with customers, and grow their loyalty. A strong customer service foundation improves the banking experience and strengthens the institution’s reputation in an increasingly competitive market. Now that you know the answer to What is customer service in banking?, we can move toward other nuances.

Banking Systems: What Are the Primary Needs in Customer Support?

Today, banking systems must rapidly adapt to the changing environment and new security requirements in the face of cyber risks. To remain competitive, banking support should address the key needs defining their customer-centric approach.

Security and Fraud Prevention

Security is the cornerstone of all banking systems. With the technological threats becoming a new urgent issue, this factor has turned into a priority. According to the survey of European banks in 2024, 79% of respondents found a cyber risk to be the biggest operational risk for the banking sector. This is especially crucial as financial operations and handling customer data have moved into the digital space.

A data breach entails significant financial consequences. For example, IBM’s report mentions that the average cost of a data breach in financial institutions was $4.88 million in 2024. Customer service then has to do more than just react to security complaints — it has to become a part of fraud prevention and respond promptly to emerging threats. 

Mobility and Accessibility

Financial transactions no longer require visiting a bank — everything can be done from a computer or phone, and the same goes for banking support. Nothing annoys customers more than going to a physical financial institution to resolve a task that could have been resolved with a few taps on the phone. This mobility is becoming an expected norm. In the past year, 66% of U.S. residents have used a mobile phone or the internet to pay bills, according to the Gender Data Portal.

The numbers are even higher in Europe (Finland — almost 89%) and Australia (nearly 83%). IT support for banks also starts to prioritize accessibility to remain relevant, ensuring that digital services are easy to use for all customers, including those with disabilities or limited technological experience.

Innovation and Automation

Banking systems are surprisingly rigid when it comes to innovation. Partially, this stems from heavier legal tracking of any new ideas, which makes breaking a tradition much more difficult. However, automation is already here: it allows consultants to reduce manual processes. By using technology, they can minimize unnecessary effort and focus more on complex core tasks. AI-powered chatbots improve customer experience while lowering operational costs.

Simplicity

Complicated banking processes frustrate customers. Handling financial procedures is hard enough, and users can lose interest in the service altogether. Customer service in banking sector should be simple. Still, it’s often the opposite — many processes take long hours or, on some occasions, even days to address. Nevertheless, customers are growing increasingly more aware of the opportunities the digital age brings them, and they expect them to be brought to banking systems, too. 

Personalization and Data-Driven Decisions

Datasets that banking institutions have their hands on can help them offer user-centric support and services. To enhance your fintech support service, you can provide personalized financial recommendations using AI and big data. This proactive approach puts users in the center and builds trust with the banking systems.

Having acknowledged the importance of customer service in banks and the specific needs to address, let’s move toward the solutions. 

Strategies to Improve Customer Service in Banking

Here are the strategies to improve customer service that organizations can implement to build a premier customer experience.

Rely on Data for Better Insights and Personalized Experience

Support teams operating in the banking market have access to information unlike any other — this empowers them to analyze it to improve their assistance. The gained insights can help them predict customer behavior and expectations and identify their needs before they arise. Big data analytics in the banking market is expected to grow from $10.56 million in 2025 to almost $30 million in 2030, with a CAGR of 23.11%.

While not all of this information can be available to support consultants, the amount of information to use for customer service improvement is still impressive. Understanding how to improve customer service in banks through data-driven insights allows institutions to create more user-centric solutions and personalized service recommendations.

Use AI for Automation and Scaled Productivity

AI-powered solutions are the new black for customer service in financial services: they automate tasks, enhance performance, and decrease routine tasks for consultants. With AI, you can reduce wait time for loan approval or complaint processing. This is an innovative response to an increasing number of digital banking users, which places additional pressure on support teams.

In 2017, the number of digital banking users in the U.S. was just 5 million — in 2024, the number was almost 62 million, and it’s projected to reach 80.78 million in 2028. Using AI for banking automation decreases the number of customer inquiries per consultant and the new technology to deal with routine and simple requests.

Create an Online Self-Service Help Center

Sometimes, we underestimate how flexible and resourceful customers are when seeking answers to their banking challenges. Engaging in interactions with chatbots or human professionals can take too much time. Instead, such self-service alternatives as FAQ sections and a knowledge base can be more efficient and provide the same responses.

Implementing a helpdesk for banking that includes well-organized self-service resources allows customers to find solutions quickly, reducing the need for direct support. Such self-service options enable customers to perform transactions, access information, and manage accounts without reaching out to support. 

Prioritize Fast Responses

Banking systems are all about quick responsiveness. This is imperative in the industry when a customer might need to conduct an immediate transaction or block their digital wallets or cards to prevent fraud — they may need help 24/7. To maintain security and trust, you can deploy fast bank customer service to minimize risks and frustrations.

One way to achieve this is by optimizing your banking call center to handle urgent requests efficiently, ensuring customers receive timely assistance. You can also diversify communication channels and set an immediate escalation to support consultants in case of security alerts. 

Be Flexible and Proactive

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the banking sector is known for its slow response to change. While it’s understandable, it’s one of the reasons customers feel less likely to seek support. Try to predict their needs through data or the history of past exchanges. If your company notices a particular trend that can lead to bugs or disruptions in the service, don’t hope the users won’t see it. Notify them and explain how you’re planning to fix this.

Examples of proactive customer service include sending alerts about potential technical issues, offering alternative solutions before a problem escalates, and providing regular updates on service improvements. Plus, organize regular training and case analysis to teach your consultants actions in various situations. 

Setting Up Outsourced Banking Support

Bank customer support outsourcing is a solution if you want to focus on your core tasks instead of processes that can be delegated. You can take several steps to integrate your outsourced customer support to ensure a smooth connection and optimized operational strategy. Having outsourced to a skilled team, you can achieve the following.

Gather Customer Data and Maintain Centralized Databases

We’ve already highlighted the importance of data, but now, we want to emphasize the role of unified databases. These databases store customer profiles, transaction history, and previous interactions you can use to improve customer experience. The priority, however, should always be security and data protection. While integrating your new team, ensure that the consultants are trained in security processes to prevent potential data breaches.

Establish Omnichannel Support

Users don’t like switching from one device to another to complete a particular transaction or to connect with support. Diversify your support channels by integrating customer support in email, in-app chats, phone, and even social media if you have one; doing so will immediately shorten the perceived distance between your organization and customers. 

Vikas Khorana from Forbes comments that over-emphasis on a few support channels to save resources is …

“… a relic of a different moment in history. It was a time before the dawn of the tablet and the fast-changing advertising landscape on social media, and it was a time when the average consumer only used two touchpoints per purchase.”

Omnichannel support is a modern solution for financial systems that helps users reach customer support specialists rapidly and without extra steps. 

Speak the Customers’ Language 

Banking customer support specialists interact with a broad range of users, from individuals looking for quick assistance to business institutions with more complicated tasks to address. Consultants should be trained to respond to all customers differently and use language and style that is more suitable for them (without falling into the buddy talk). Conduct regular training sessions and coaching to practice different communication styles and teach consultants to identify the customers’ mood. 

Maintain Clear Communication and Performance Monitoring

When an outsourced company starts its collaboration with a fintech or banking organization, it often adapts to the company’s communication style and processes. To ensure a seamless integration, such companies can establish specific KPIs, metrics to measure customer success, and set clear service-level agreements (SLAs) to track performance. 

Future Trends in Banking Customer Support

Don’t just bluntly copy others — look into the future and think how you can do it better than your competition. This means tapping into the newest trends and investing in the ones that work best for you. Let’s explore what banks and customers want and what you can do about it.

The future holds a mixture of technology and human skill. Automation and AI in banking are here for the long run, so banks should embrace them and seek ways to add these innovations to their customer support. However, this tendency doesn’t have to replace human interactions — quite the contrary. Technology doesn’t make users feel seen.

The human touch shouldn’t disappear, so customer service teams are calling for more personal and emotionally intelligent communication. Such communication leads to higher customer retention and builds closer relationships with your organization. 

Digital transformation is here to stay in banking, as in other industries. Customers want fast responses, better performance, and higher quality of service. 

The study by Deloitte, which also targets the future of this industry, divided respondents into traditionalists, online embracers, and digital adventurers:

• Traditionalists (28%): people who perform most of their operations in physical banks or through ATMs. 
• Online embracers (43%): these users combine traditional and digital banking, going online if the banks have already made such transactions accessible. 
• Digital adventurers (28%): this group, represented mainly by Millennials, prefers digital banking and rarely visits physical branches. 

So, the users of tomorrow, specifically the younger generations, are gradually shifting toward online customer support and banking operations. 

The existing security concerns will contribute to stricter security procedures, such as voice and biometric authentication. With the rise of new threats and ease of identity theft, these steps are becoming more pressing. This also means it’s important for customer support to integrate these measures into its processes when interacting with the customers. 

SupportYourApp and Banking Systems

SupportYourApp is the go-to company for your banking customer service. We:

• are PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider certified. As per certifications, our systems and our team undergo checkups annually, which ensures a consistent level of protection for our clients’ customers’ data. We take security seriously and ensure anonymity and proper threat prevention.
• provide regular team training and coaching on the latest trends in customer support. Plus, we organize industry-specific learning sessions to improve our consultants’ expertise. 
• constantly expand the list of tools and software we provide our services with and upgrade our own programs and hardware. We believe that using the latest technologies is crucial to improving customer experience in banking.

Our team is practical and adaptable, making us a perfect fit for dynamic environments with demanding tasks requiring creativity and critical thinking. 

Summary

Companies in the banking sector that seek better relationships with their target audience can benefit from investing in stellar, well-trained customer support. As users increasingly expect mobility and quick responsiveness, banking organizations should find solutions that combine human skills and automation. Diverse communication channels, an emphasis on security, and a customer-centric mindset will improve user satisfaction and decrease user churn. 

FAQ

What Is a Banking System? 

A banking system is a network of financial institutions, technologies, and regulations that enable financial transactions and services. It includes commercial and central banks, digital banking platforms, and financial intermediaries.

What Is Exceptional Customer Service in Banking?

Exceptional customer service in banking is the mix of the following: it anticipates its users’ needs, provides personalization, and uses big data to improve customer experience at every step. 

What Is the Role of Customer Service in a Bank?

Customer service is present on all levels of the bank’s operations. It helps customers with transactions and reporting fraud or scams, assists with account setup and loan applications, and solves disputes. Its goal is to ensure a smooth customer experience and a high level of customer satisfaction.

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