Whether it’s a prospect account opening attempt, a candidate application or a supplier seeking project approval, every touchpoint with your financial institution is a brand moment. If your tech and workflows create drag, you’re telling people they don’t matter and you don’t care.
1. Customer experience: fix the basics before you fund the funnel
Marketing can’t out-advertise a broken experience. If the basics are clunky, every campaign becomes an expensive way to drive people into frustration.
Look out for—and fix—the pain points:
- Website paths: can someone find the right account or loan quickly and take a clear next step?
- Forms: do they work on mobile and do they ask for only what you truly need?
- Handoffs: do customers have to repeat their issue three times before getting a solution?
- Follow-up: does someone respond promptly or does the lead disappear into a black hole?
If you’re spending to generate brand awareness and inquiries, you owe it to your budget to make sure you can convert.
2. Your employer brand story starts at “Apply Now”
Marketing can’t out-run an internal experience that contradicts the brand. If hiring and onboarding are agonizing, your culture story becomes a slogan people don’t believe.
Partner with HR to uncover the friction points that quietly cost you talent:
- Entry paths: can someone find the right role and apply on mobile without creating an account or retyping their resume?
- Follow-up: do candidates get a clear timeline and a real next step or do they disappear into silence?
- Scheduling: is interview coordination self-serve and simple or weeks of back-and-forth emails?
- Day 1 readiness: do new hires have business cards, logins, tools and training when they arrive or do they spend their first week waiting?
Thou shalt not ghost. Leaving a candidate in the dark with unanswered phone calls or emails is a cardinal sin. Recruiting is a brand experience.
Employees must feel valued. If you want them to deliver the brand, your systems have to make it easy for them to join it and live it.
3. Suppliers tell your brand story, too
Suppliers are a very important audience that’s often overlooked. If your process is slow, unclear or disorganized, you’ll pay more, wait longer and get less of their best work.
Eliminate the barriers that create rework and cause expensive delays:
- Registration: if you have a procurement portal for registration, make sure the process is smooth and works in all browsers.
- Onboarding: is it clear who owns procurement, security and approvals or does every supplier get bounced between departments?
- Asset access: can partners quickly get the latest brand standards, product info and compliance guidelines or are they kept waiting and guessing?
- Review flow: is there a defined approval order with deadlines or do edits arrive late, scattered and contradictory?
- Versioning: does everyone know what’s current or do teams keep working from “final-v7” attachments?
- Billing: are invoice requirements consistent and payments predictable or do service providers spend time chasing status?
Operational friction costs more than fees. Banks and credit unions who are slow pay risk a brand reputation that’s not aligned with their “financial responsibility” positioning.
If you want partners to move fast and protect your brand, your tech and workflow have to be as disciplined as your messaging.
Friction is everybody’s business
Marketing must align efforts with Operations, HR and others in the bank because this is never just one department’s responsibility or issue.
It matters: smooth things out and see a lift in conversion rates, recruiting outcomes and vendor performance. When you make it easy for people to take the next step, you don’t have to shout louder. Your brand does the work.
Help your team deliver a smooth people-to-people experience, not matter who they meet. Read our article Don’t be that person: 11 courtesies every team member should master.
burned matches photo credit: Patrycja Jadach on Unsplash
