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In 2019, Micah Bowers—then a senior designer at the talent network Toptal—sounded the death knell for branding as we once knew it.

"To create an effective visual identity, it's crucial that a brand designer have big-picture knowledge of a company's customer journey—all the ways customers interact with the company and perform tasks over time," he said in an article in Fast Company entitled "Branding is dead, CX design is king."

"Why is this so important?" Bowers continued. "Designing promotional collateral for brand channels isn't like creating a responsive interface for different screen sizes. It's not enough to recycle and resize the same design elements over and over. Every channel has unique constraints and content demands.

Financial organizations have struggled to keep pace with consumer expectations in recent years. Although some brands are making significant headway in designing a digital-first user experience for their customers, non-traditional financial companies, and even non-financial companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google, are bringing their customer experience prowess into the financial sector.

But there is a clear path forward. By building a cohesive brand and user experience (UX) design across touchpoints and channels, financial organizations can create the types of customer experiences that are quickly becoming standard.

An End-to-End Customer Experience

In a purely creative capacity, cohesive design means matching design elements across the spectrum of creative assets the organization employs. This concept is simple if you consider it at a fundamental level: Banks want to maintain the same logos and designs across their apps, advertisements, and branches to ensure customers recognize them easily.

But from a UX perspective, cohesive design also means building an end-to-end experience that customers can trust, regardless of what touchpoint or channel they use to engage with the brand. Every channel should include unified branding elements, but they should also provide customers with the same sets of tools and capabilities they expect from other environments, whenever it's reasonable to do so.

An end-to-end or integrated customer experience also spans customer environments. According to McKinsey & Company, "Successful companies have realized that the boundaries between products, services, and environments have blurred. They know as well that they need an integrated view to design end-to-end experiences that are truly valuable to consumers and successful in the market."

An Experience Design That's Built for Humans

Another important part of building a cohesive customer experience is designing experiences for humans. While this might sound like a no-brainer, it's sometimes a challenge for brands that are still perfecting their digital-first designs.

Some companies have discovered that they can enhance the customer experience by conveying information in a way that is relatable, intuitive, and easy to understand. They've also paired this philosophy with technology to design more human-centric financial experiences.

For example, TD Canada Trust provides customers with an AI-powered virtual assistant called TD Clari(tm) through its banking smartphone app. TD Clari(tm) acts as an automated chatbot that answers frequently asked questions, but it also allows users to get information about their accounts conversationally rather than forcing them to conduct manual searches in their account history.

(Source: td.com)

Banking customers can get instant answers to everyday questions about their accounts, check their account balances, view how much they've spent, and more. Over time, TD Clari(tm) will even learn new skills to help improve TD Bank customers' experience.

An Intuitive Customer Journey

Cohesive design can also be used to create clear journey maps for customers and users of financial applications.

For example, if your web designers already employ a "Jobs to Be Done" framework when designing your website's user interface, you can adopt a similar framework to the entire customer journey. The key difference is that today's customers engage with brands across channels and touchpoints.

A customer might open a bank's smartphone app to start a transaction, then finish the transaction through a phone call or in a branch if they need extra assistance. Similarly, a customer might start a conversation about purchasing a financial product with a representative via live chat, only to finish the transaction through the brand's website.

The purpose of cohesive design in this instance is to make the journey intuitive for the customer, no matter which channels and touchpoints they use. Ideally, the customer won't even be aware that they are switching channels. Each step in their journey should be logical and instinctive.

Learn More About Designing a More Cohesive Customer Experience

If there's one theme that encompasses all the points made above, it's that customer-centricity must be at the core of financial organizations' design decisions. It must inform every decision you make regarding technology deployment, user experience, and your creative branding.

If you're ready to build a cohesive experience for your customers, you don't want to miss the next CXFS virtual event, happening online from June 23 - 24, 2021. Click here to find out more!