Five Key Takeaways from CXFS 2017

CXFS is one of the world’s first trade shows dedicated to customer experience in the financial services industry. CXFS is held annually in Boston; show attendance grew by 62% this year and I met attendees from as far as South Africa, Ireland and Georgia (the country) who found about the show through Google and decided to fly all the way to attend.

This was our third Financial Services-targeted show this year after Finovate San Jose (April 2017) and In|Vest New York (July 2017). We (Eltropy) attended as one of the sponsors for the show.

At CXFS, I met Customer Experience leaders from 100+ financial institutions. Key learnings from the show include the following:

1. CX is moving up the org chart at Financial institutions. Earlier, Customer Experience was a function under “Marketing” or “Operations” or “Business Units”, but now CX is a well defined function with cross functional roles. The growth of FinTech — and the change in customer behavior — are driving the need for Financial Services companies to invest in CX.
2. Managing “scale” is hard but critical. From larger banks we learned that harnessing holistic customer interaction data is of great interest especially when it can be coupled with solid engagement and outcome metrics. Managing the scale of data gathering and analysis is critical for large institutions.
3. Smartphones are changing the game. Wealth Management Execs have a keen focus on enabling their advisors to communicate with clients the way clients want — “more and more of our clients use smartphones and want personalized information from their advisors”.
4. Text Messaging is here. Text Messaging as a customer communication channel is real and happening now. Most Financial Services firms have deployed, or are thinking of deploying Texting for one-way “alerting” i.e. to notify a client when their account balance is low, fraud alerts etc. Most CX leaders are convinced that the next evolution of Texting is for two-way “conversations” for enhancing the customer experience to drive sales and revenue growth.
5. Compliance continues to be a key concern. Compliance to TCPA was part of almost every conversation I had with CX leaders. Eltropy demo’d industry’s first Salesforce-based Texting and Archival system at CXFS — which provides a very appealing solution to the compliance issue.

Check out this 2-min video to relive some of the CXFS 2017 moments. Looking forward to seeing ya’ll next year in beautiful Boston.