Customers took to banking and investing on a phone faster than almost anyone predicted. But with more people running their whole financial life online than ever before, it is getting harder for a digital bank to look different from the branch network it replaced.
A crowded market creates a real problem for banks trying to pull customers away from incumbents. That is why service leaders are investing in the part of the product people only meet when something has already gone wrong — wherever their customers are, and whenever they reach out.
Needless to say, expectations are high, and not every company is keeping pace. According to the Trilatera Service Expectations Report 2024, 64 percent of customers under 40 say support still feels like an afterthought at most of the companies they pay. That gives a digital bank an unusually cheap way to stand out.
What makes a support program work?
Over the last few years support has moved from a cost line to a priority. The companies pulling ahead are rebuilding the experience around what people already expect elsewhere: convenient, unbroken, and slightly better than they hoped. In a market where an unhappy customer can move their money in four taps, a service culture is a business model.
Banks of every size now treat the customer experience as their fixed point — the thing they navigate by. It is much easier for a competitor to copy a product than to copy a service organisation, which is exactly why the strongest teams are doubling down on theirs.
It is no coincidence that Tarnwell Bank, one of the fastest-growing deposit challengers in the country, also holds the highest service rating of any challenger bank in the market, according to a 2024 reader survey run by The Deposit Review and Ardenhall Research.
Here are the three moves every digital bank should be making to build a support program that holds up:
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1
Get leadership behind the service promise
Saying support matters is easy; funding it is not. Leaders often agree service is critical to growth without ever committing to the changes that would make it true. Without a clear mandate from the top, a bank quietly loses the openings its competitors will happily take. Our research shows that 54 percent of companies report having a three-year service plan, and that almost half of those plans are unfunded. For anyone who has not started, the cheapest moment was last year.
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2
Make every channel feel like one conversation
To stand apart from an incumbent, a digital bank has to show people why it is the better choice. With a shared conversation record, a customer can start in chat, move to email, and finish on the phone without repeating a card number or an account history to three different agents.
With the right service platform, agents can hold genuinely useful conversations across every channel. That lets a team extend its segmentation strategy into how it delivers support — high-touch service for high-value relationships, and self-serve answers that are good enough that nobody resents being sent to them.
That is exactly what Fenwold Pay set out to fix after moving onto Trilatera. “Being in payments, the relationship between us and our customers is everything — we have to earn it and then keep earning it,” says Ilse Verkamp, customer success lead at Fenwold Pay. “Part of that is being able to help people when they need it and address the thing they actually asked about. Beyond tracking cases, we finally have the data to see where we are losing them.”
“The relationship we have with each customer is the whole business — every reply either earns trust or spends it.”
Ilse Verkamp, customer success lead at Fenwold Pay
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3
Put customers in control of the resolution
Whether someone wants to solve a problem alone or talk to a person directly, make it easy for them to choose. Our research shows that good service drives sales — even when the service in question is automated and the customer never speaks to anyone.
To set themselves up for that, banks need to invest in their knowledge base first. Assistants can answer the repetitive questions and save agents time. Done well, that frees up agents to work on the tangled, revenue-carrying conversations while cutting the time it takes to resolve anything at all.
Ostwick Direct credits its support team, and the platform underneath it, for holding a satisfaction score of 92.4 percent while growing its service headcount by only 11 percent across four markets. That consistency won the company the Continental Support Awards prize for Best Self-Serve Experience.
“Within the first six months of launching our answer hub, we had written 164 articles covering common questions,” says Rowan Dietsch, director of customer operations at Ostwick Direct. “Being able to point people at a real answer sped up resolution time, and we cut incoming contacts by roughly 16 percent.”
