Customer experience in banking: How omnichannel engagement and AI are redefining the standard

Banking customers expect the same fast, personalized service on WhatsApp, SMS, or in-app chat that they get from any consumer app, and they switch banks fast when that expectation isn’t met. For CX directors and IT decision-makers, connecting every channel and every AI touchpoint into one consistent experience is the real work behind proving CX matters.

This article covers the trends reshaping banking CX in 2026, the core strategies for improving customer experience in banking, and the metrics that prove it’s working.

Key takeaways

• CX is now a revenue driver in banking, not a support-desk cost. Banks that push from good to excellent CX see outsized revenue gains, while a single bad experience is enough to lose a customer for good.
• Agentic AI is the defining 2026 trend. AI is shifting from answering questions to taking autonomous action; checking balances, processing transfers, recommending products; without waiting for step-by-step human approval.
• Conversational banking is replacing the traditional banking app for routine tasks. Customers increasingly expect to check balances, transfer funds, and get recommendations inside a single WhatsApp or messaging conversation.
• True omnichannel means shared context, not just channel presence. Being on WhatsApp, SMS, and in-app chat isn’t omnichannel unless a customer can move between them without repeating themselves.
• Measurement requires more than one score. NPS, CSAT, and CES each capture a different signal, and pairing them with self-service containment, first contact resolution, and average handle time gives a fuller picture of CX performance.
• Infobip AgentOS brings these pieces together in one system: omnichannel messaging, AI agents, journey orchestration, and a shared customer profile, so banks aren’t left integrating point solutions on their own.

Why banking customer experience is a revenue driver, not just a service metric

Banking leadership teams still sometimes treat CX as a support-desk line item. The data says otherwise. Forrester’s ongoing CX Index research confirms the pattern: revenue gains from improving customer experience compound exponentially for banks, with the largest gains going to institutions that push from a good experience to an excellent one, not the ones merely fixing what’s broken. That gap compounds every renewal cycle, every cross-sell conversation, every account a customer almost closed but didn’t.

The downside risk is just as steep. PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 52% of consumers stopped using or buying from a brand after a single bad experience with its products or services. In banking, where switching used to carry real friction, that friction is disappearing fast: neobanks and fintechs now onboard a new customer in minutes, with none of the legacy baggage incumbent banks carry. Personetics research adds a sharper edge to this pressure: 84% of banking customers would likely switch to a bank that provided timely, relevant advice through AI-driven insights and product recommendations.

None of this is abstract. Poor CX shows up as higher churn, lower cross-sell attach rates, and rising cost-to-serve as more issues escalate to expensive, slow channels. Strong CX shows up as the opposite: customers who stay longer, adopt more products, and cost less to support because self-service actually resolves their issue. In a market where checking and savings products are increasingly commoditized, customer experience in banking has become the primary lever banks still control.

Banking CX trends reshaping the industry in 2026

These are the trends worth prioritizing in 2026 planning, filtered to the ones that reflect where banking CX budgets are actually moving, not generic industry-wide predictions.

Agentic AI moves from experiment to operations

This is the single biggest banking CX trend for 2026. Forrester puts it directly: “Agentic AI is on the cusp of transforming financial services.” The shift is from AI that answers questions to AI that takes autonomous action: checking balances, processing transfers, updating account details, and recommending products without waiting for a human to approve each step.

The AI agents built for this shift access a unified customer profile across every channel, so they make context-aware, autonomous decisions rather than following a fixed script, whichever conversational channel the customer is already using.

Conversational banking becomes the primary digital channel

Forrester frames this trend precisely: conversational banking is the gateway to the next generation of digital banking experiences. For routine tasks, checking a balance, transferring funds, getting a quick recommendation, conversational banking on messaging apps is replacing the traditional mobile banking app.

In practice, this means a customer checks their balance, transfers funds to a friend, and receives a personalized savings recommendation, all inside one WhatsApp conversation, with no app switching required.

Hyper-personalization powered by conversational data

Most banks have moved past first-name-in-the-subject-line personalization. The next step, hyper-personalization driven by real-time behavioral data, depends on a data source most CX platforms never capture: conversational data itself. Chat transcripts, chatbot sessions, WhatsApp exchanges, and contact center interactions generate intent signals, sentiment, and behavioral context that transactional data alone can’t provide.

Treating that conversational data as first-class profile data, not an afterthought bolted onto a traditional CRM, is what separates hyper-personalization from the first-name-in-subject-line era, and it’s the difference between a bank that predicts what a customer needs next and one that’s still guessing.

The contact center evolves into a revenue-generating hub

Banking contact centers are shedding their cost-center reputation. AI-assisted agents, proactive outreach, and true omnichannel service are turning them into a revenue channel instead of a pure expense line.

The contact centers pulling this off give agents the full customer profile on screen, surface AI-recommended next-best-actions in real time, and let conversations flow across channels without the customer repeating anything they’ve already said.

Core strategies for improving customer experience in banking

These are the strategies every improving-customer-experience-in-banking initiative needs to get right before anything more advanced works.

Deliver unified omnichannel experiences across every touchpoint

Omnichannel is the most cited banking CX strategy across the entire industry, and also the most commonly misapplied. Being present on WhatsApp, SMS, and in-app chat isn’t the same as being omnichannel. True omnichannel means a customer who starts a loan inquiry on WhatsApp can walk into a branch an hour later and continue the same conversation, with the same context, without repeating a single detail.

Deloitte’s 2025 Future of Retail Banking research confirms how much this matters to customers directly: consumers now expect banking to be unified across every touchpoint, yet too often they encounter a fragmented reality instead. Closing that gap is a stated reason customers pick one bank over another, not just a satisfaction-survey footnote.

Power real-time personalization with unified customer data

Batch segmentation refreshed overnight is not personalization anymore. It’s a schedule. Customer behavior changes by the hour, and the offer that made sense at 9am can be irrelevant by 3pm if a customer just missed a mortgage payment or maxed out a credit line.

Real personalization means profiles that update continuously and trigger the right offer, on the right channel, within seconds of a behavior change. That requires more than a CRM feed. It requires conversational data, meaning chatbot transcripts, WhatsApp message history, and contact center interactions, sitting inside the same profile as transactional and CRM data.

The payoff is measurable: McKinsey research on banking personalization found that banks investing in personalization and analytics see 5-15% higher campaign revenue and 10-30% better marketing-spend efficiency.

Deploy AI chatbots and virtual assistants that resolve, not just route

AI-powered banking CX is the defining trend of the current SERP, and the numbers back it up. Bank of America’s Erica has processed over 3 billion interactions, with more than 98% of users finding the information they need without escalating to a human agent.

Metrobank, a Philippines-based corporate and retail bank and Infobip client, shows what that same shift looks like on the Infobip side: it uses Viber for Business messaging with rich media and Salesforce-driven personalization to move toward a more conversational, AI-assisted banking experience.

The gap between a good banking chatbot and a mediocre one isn’t the AI model. It’s what the AI can see and do. Most banking chatbots are still glorified FAQ routers: they answer a scripted question and hand off everything else. The bar worth clearing is a chatbot with real-time access to the same customer profile every other channel uses, so it can personalize actions, not just answers, and when a handoff to a human agent is genuinely needed, it happens with full context attached, not a blank slate.

Orchestrate end-to-end banking customer journeys

Journey orchestration shows up in nearly every competitor’s banking CX content, almost always disconnected from actual messaging channel activation. A journey map that lives in a slide deck doesn’t help a customer who abandons a loan application at 11pm.

The best banking journey orchestration designs complete customer journeys, onboarding, transaction alerts, proactive service, retention campaigns, that activate automatically across every messaging channel. A customer who abandons a loan application receives a personalized WhatsApp reminder within minutes, not a batch email the next morning. A high-value customer approaching a renewal date gets a proactive RCS message with a tailored offer, with no manual intervention and no batch processing delay.

Strengthen security and build trust through verified messaging

Convenience gets most of the attention in banking CX discussions, but security runs a close second, and almost no competitor content connects security to the messaging channel itself. That’s a missed opportunity, because the channel matters. RCS branded messaging, WhatsApp Business verified accounts, and two-factor authentication delivered via SMS or voice all create a trust layer that generic CX platforms simply can’t replicate, since they don’t own the delivery infrastructure underneath.

GSMA research shows that 70% of consumers say RCS makes them more likely to communicate with a brand, a signal that verified, branded messaging is becoming a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.

How to improve customer experience across banking segments

Banking CX strategies don’t apply identically everywhere. Digital banking, branch banking, and commercial banking each carry distinct expectations, and treating them the same way leaves gaps in all three.

Digital and mobile banking

Digital-first customers benchmark their banking app against Netflix and Spotify, not against other banks. Northmill Bank CEO Julie Chatterjee has made this comparison explicitly.

The mobile app is turning into a collaborative workspace rather than a static list of account balances.

In practice, that means in-app messaging, a deliberate push notification strategy instead of a generic blast schedule, digital onboarding journeys that don’t drop customers mid-application, and abandoned-application recovery delivered over WhatsApp rather than a delayed email.

Branch and in-person banking

Physical branches haven’t disappeared, and banks planning around a branch-free future are planning around the wrong data. Accenture found 63% of global consumers still want a physical location for financial management. The opportunity isn’t choosing digital or branch, it’s connecting them: phygital strategies that use appointment booking via messaging, post-visit follow-up on WhatsApp, and in-branch digital self-service kiosks.

Accenture also found 76% of consumers are willing to use micro-branches or smart banking booths, a meaningful signal that the branch itself is evolving in format, not disappearing.

Commercial and business banking

Commercial banking CX gets far less attention than retail, despite carrying its own distinct requirements. B2B banking clients need dedicated relationship management channels, support for complex transactions, clear risk management communications, and industry-specific insights delivered on the channel they actually prefer, not the channel that’s easiest for the bank to staff.

The commercial banking teams closing that gap give relationship managers the same full customer context that retail teams get for consumer accounts, dedicated business messaging channels included, so a commercial relationship manager sees the same unified history, not a stripped-down version built for a different customer tier.

Measuring banking customer experience: metrics that drive action

Measuring customer experience in banking effectively means pairing quantitative metrics with sentiment and interaction analysis, not relying on a single survey score. Net Promoter Score (NPS) captures overall loyalty. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures how a specific interaction landed. Customer Effort Score (CES) tracks how hard a customer had to work to get something resolved, often the most predictive of the three for churn risk.

Beyond those three, digital adoption rate, self-service containment rate, first contact resolution, and average handle time round out a full measurement picture. A bank with high NPS but low self-service containment is still bleeding cost-to-serve, even if customers report being satisfied.

The best measurement approach closes the loop by feeding campaign performance data straight back into the customer profile, so every interaction improves the next one instead of sitting in a separate reporting silo, and combines these quantitative metrics with sentiment analysis and interaction analytics pulled directly from conversational channels, not just post-interaction surveys that only reach customers who bother to respond.

How AgentOS delivers on these strategies

AgentOS brings the capabilities above into one platform rather than requiring banks to integrate point solutions themselves.

Omnichannel messaging and the Conversational CDP

Omnichannel messaging within AgentOS is built natively across WhatsApp, SMS, RCS, Viber, in-app messaging, email, voice, and 15+ channels total.

Every channel runs through the same customer profile, so branch staff, contact center agents, and AI chatbots all read from the same conversation history.

That profile is powered by the Conversational CDP, which ingests conversational signals, chatbot transcripts, WhatsApp history, contact center interactions, alongside traditional transactional and CRM data into a single, continuously updating record. The AI chatbot builder taps into that same profile in real time, so it can personalize actions, not just answers, and hand off to a human agent with full context attached rather than a blank slate. Metrobank puts that same CDP-powered profile to work today across Viber for Business, keeping every customer interaction connected to the same record.

Journey orchestration and AI agents

Journey orchestration within AgentOS designs complete customer journeys, onboarding, transaction alerts, proactive service, retention campaigns, that activate automatically across every channel: a customer who abandons a loan application gets a WhatsApp reminder within minutes rather than a batch email, and a high-value customer nearing a renewal date gets a proactive RCS offer with no manual intervention.

AI agents within AgentOS access that same unified CDP profile to make context-aware, autonomous decisions across whichever conversational channel a customer is already using, and the Conversational AI platform orchestrates WhatsApp banking, RCS transaction alerts, SMS OTP verification, and in-app chat so a customer can check a balance, transfer funds, and get a savings recommendation without switching apps.

Cloud contact center, commercial banking, and branch connectivity

The cloud contact center within AgentOS puts the full CDP profile on an agent’s screen and lets conversations move across channels without a customer repeating anything they’ve already said.

That same context extends to commercial banking, where AgentOS enables dedicated WhatsApp Business channels with the same full CDP access relationship managers get for retail accounts, to branch interactions, which feed back into the same profile used online, and to digital onboarding, where journey orchestration triggers an automatic recovery message the moment a session times out.

Enterprise infrastructure and compliance

Insights and analytics within AgentOS closes the loop by feeding campaign performance data straight back into CDP profiles.

Underpinning all of this is Infobip’s own carrier infrastructure: 800+ direct operator connections across 190+ countries. Every communication, from OTP verification to proactive service alerts, moves through that network rather than third-party APIs, backed by ISO and SOC validations and GDPR compliance for regulated financial services. Infobip has also been named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CPaaS for multiple consecutive years.

Turn banking customer experience into a competitive advantage

The banks winning on customer experience in banking aren’t doing one thing well. They’re connecting omnichannel messaging, AI agents, journey orchestration, and unified customer data into a single system, so every interaction makes the next one smarter instead of starting from zero. That’s the difference between a bank with a chatbot and a bank with an actual CX strategy.

AgentOS brings all of this together in one compliant, carrier-grade stack, not a set of point solutions banks have to integrate themselves. Contact us to see how it fits your bank’s current stack, or explore AgentOS to see the full set of capabilities in one place.

Frequently asked questions