As a former US federal employee, I’m a customer of two financial services companies that focus on current and former feds. Within the past couple of months — as millions of federal employees have been subject to on-again, off-again layoffs — these companies have emailed their customers with essentially the same message. It goes something like this:

  • We know that in these uncertain times you’re worried about your finances.
  • Our personal financial advisors can help you understand your finances and plan for the future.

Unspoken, but obvious to everyone, is that you have to pay for this personal financial advice. So what these emails really offer is a chance for feds who may lose their jobs to spend more money!

You may respond that this is how business works: Identify a need — such as financial stress — and offer a product to solve it. But there’s a better way, a way that builds longer-term customer loyalty, contributes more to business performance, and aligns more closely with these companies’ stated values — which I’ll paraphrase as things like “members first,” “service,” and “community.”

This approach proved itself during the COVID-19 pandemic: Remove customer stress and offer benefits that align with the long-cultivated brand, instead of adding another expense and contradicting stated corporate values. For example, during the pandemic, companies in financial services helped customers with financial hardships by deferring loan and credit card payments, canceling various fees, and adding overdraft protection.

Even better for financial services companies: Helping customers in these and other ways improves the uptake for additional paid services (like pricey personal financial advisors), as improving customer experience (CX) boosts customer loyalty in financial services and other industries.

Has your company made a similar blunder, pitching an expensive upsell without first offering loyalty-building assistance to customers in need? It’s not too late to fix the problem. A few quick pieces of advice:

  • Reaffirm your brand. It’s unlikely that market volatility affects any of your brand fundamentals. Hastily upending a well-determined brand strategy will only cause trouble once the volatility subsides. Instead, modulate your brand’s value proposition by considering all four possible types of value that your brand can provide: economic, functional, experiential, and symbolic.
  • Recommit to CX fundamentals. Ensure that you use driver analysis for targeted CX improvements, qualitative research to plug key holes in customer understanding, data storytelling to drive action from insights, and cross-functional collaboration to ensure a journey-centric approach.
  • Provide customers with consistent, on-brand experiences. Start by reaffirming your CX vision to ensure that it aligns with your business strategy. Use The Forrester CX Vision Development Template to speed your vision review.
  • Balance customer and business needs to serve customers sustainably. Use an enterprisewide metrics framework to help maintain a long-term balance between the value for the customer and the business. It can also help you decide when to lean toward value to the customer in the short term, such as when people are losing their jobs.

Want to talk in greater detail? Forrester clients can schedule a guidance session or contact their account team.