Achieving a Frictionless Customer Experience in Fintech (by Lelen Udayan)

By Lelen Udayan, Head of Customer Experience at Mukuru (www.Mukuru.com)

By definition, a truly frictionless customer experience (CX) is unattainable even though it is the end state every fintech company strives for. Along the way, the focus falls on providing improved experiences that stem from the friction points identified across the customer journey. By doing so, companies can improve the products, processes and services they provide.

According to Gartner ( this requires fintechs to remove the elements that create unnecessary friction or make it unnecessarily difficult for customers to access products and services. To this end, Gartner ( repositions frictionless as rather about creating an effortless experience. This is important as it shifts the spotlight from what it calls “feel good” moments that have little impact on loyalty or repeat business, and instead focuses more on using CX as a means of securing repeat business while reducing operating costs.

Removes friction

Modern customers expect fintechs to focus as much on the experience they provide as the products and services offered. An improved experience is important because it shows customers that the fintech recognizes its faults and is working to improve those areas while removing the elements that can lead to dissatisfaction.

For an organization like Mukuru, increasing customer satisfaction, retention and referrals is largely due to ensuring that pain points are seen, heard and addressed. This is done by tracking the customer journey, measuring satisfaction and customer effort. In addition, Mukuru ensures that customer sentiment and the voice of the customer are prioritized throughout the business.

Basically, the only way a fintech can remove friction is to ensure that its service teams are equipped to help customers when they have a problem, question or complaint.

Engagement channels

For this to happen, the company must embrace all channels within its capabilities to invest in an omnichannel CX. A PWC report ( found that the number of companies doing this has increased by more than 60% in recent years.

Closer to home, the State of CX in South Africa 2022 report ( writes that 45% of financial sector respondents identified seamless omnichannel experience on their preferred channel as the main factor influencing customer satisfaction. As many as 64% of local fintechs have fully implemented virtual assistants and chatbots or are in the process of doing so as critical enablers of this omnichannel experience.Similarly, 27% of financial services companies have installed bots on messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, compared to just a 7% average in other sectors.

At Mukuru, our purpose is to enable greater financial inclusion for customers on the African continent – ​​still predominantly cash-based – and globally, which is why we have a tailored approach to customer channels. Channels such as USSD and WhatsApp perform well across Africa, while our app is a more relevant channel for UK customers. We have seen the impact of this strategy with WhatsApp, our largest transactional customer channel in South Africa, where the share of transactional customers has almost doubled over the past 3 years.

The golden thread through a successful omnichannel strategy is how best to meet customer expectations. This requires giving fintech employees the right tools, systems and processes to effectively support customers. With these in place, the most common points of friction can be resolved. These include things like turnaround time and understanding who the customer really is. In the case of the former, the challenges include response times and why the first point of contact may not have the answer. When it comes to the latter, it is about knowing who the individual customer is without them giving different information at each engagement point.

FinTech therefore needs to be more consistent and remove the frustration of customers repeating the query to everyone in the engagement chain or, even worse, having to call back at a later time. Furthermore, the value of self-service cannot be ignored, as digitally savvy customers may prefer to resolve their common questions themselves.

Through all this, fintech must have access to appropriate tools, competent staff and efficient processes across product lines and platforms.

Continuous travel

One of the biggest mistakes any fintech can make is to assume that creating a frictionless experience is a one-off exercise. As mentioned, becoming frictionless is an end goal that will never be fully realized. Driving this is setting the business up to learn from its past CX mistakes.

To do so, the process of CX improvements is required to be formalized and rolled out to all relevant areas of the business. Service personnel must be empowered to solve customers’ pain points. In addition, there is a growing need to establish effective self-service solutions where customers become less dependent on human touch points. Perhaps most importantly, customer success can only be realized by continuously monitoring the journey, touchpoints and voice of the customer.

All of this can be distilled into starting a CX project, implementing it and then iterating as needed. Mukuru ( has made CX part of its ethos. This enables the business to continuously drive improvements in this area. FinTech should strive to make every customer interaction with the business positive.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Mukuru.

About Mukuru:
Mukuru is a leading Next Gen Financial Services platform in South Africa offering affordable and reliable financial services to a customer base of over 11 million across Africa, Asia and Europe.

With over 100 million transactions to date, our core was built with international money transfers and from this base we have developed a suite of services to meet the wider financial needs of our customers. We now operate in over 50 countries and across over 300 transfer corridors.

We are a business that puts the customer at the center of everything we do, and for that reason we serve customers across physical and digital channels, with various payment methods (cash, card, wallet) as well as a variety of engagement platforms, including WhatsApp, USSD, contact center , app, website, agents and a branch and stand network.

Mukuru has been listed as one of the top 100 cross-border payments companies in the world in the 2022 FXC Intelligence Top 100 Cross-Border Payments Companies (https://apo-opa.info/3jT4RpR).

Mukuru won two awards in 2021:

• In July 2021, Mukuru also took the top honors for Most Innovative Financial Services Provider South Africa 2021 at the World Economic Magazine Award Winners 2021 as well as at the International Business Magazine Award 2021
• In April 2021, Mukuru took the top award for Most Innovative Online Remittance App – South Africa, 2021 at the Global Brand Awards 2021

Further information can be found at www.Mukuru.com/sa.