Enabling Customer Empowerment: Choice, Use, and Voice

This brief addresses the problem faced by financial service providers (FSPs) related to low active use of digital financial services and some of its underlying causes related to customer experiences. It explores how empowering customers can help address the issue and the role that FSPs can play in the same. The brief reflects on the hypothesis that customer empowerment, a process that builds customer trust and confidence through an interactive relationship between providers and customers, can lead to a win-win situation for both providers and customers. The brief also provides recommendations to FSPs for supporting customer empowerment. It suggests that FSPs should:

• Understand how people use money, how they prefer to interact with providers, and how they identify the attributes of products, services, and channels that are their priority, such as timeliness, convenience, social value, cost, and risk of a loss;
• Encourage customers to exercise agency by building trust and confidence through making available testing services;
• Provide staff and agents with the tools, information, and communication skills to engage effectively with customers;
• Create an environment that permits openness, transparency, mutual respect, and constructive feedback, and allows customers to exercise their rights and responsibilities.