What Financial Services and Healthcare Teams Need to Know
by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
In most industries, a bad customer experience (CX) costs you a customer. In financial services and healthcare, it can also cost you an exam finding, a complaint to a regulator, or a line item in an audit report that someone on your compliance team now has to explain. That’s a meaningfully different kind of pressure, and it changes what a customer experience audit is actually worth to these two industries specifically — not just as a commercial tool, but as something that can double as genuine regulatory evidence.
A caveat before I go further: I’m not a lawyer or a compliance officer, and nothing here is regulatory advice. What I am is someone who’s watched CX and compliance teams operate as two separate functions inside the same organization, often documenting the same customer touchpoints in two different ways, for two different audiences, without either one fully benefiting from what the other already knows.
The silo that’s costing you twice
Here’s the pattern I see constantly in regulated industries: compliance runs its own fair-treatment reviews, complaint trend analysis, and documentation processes, built specifically to satisfy an examiner or auditor. CX, separately, runs its own journey mapping and improvement work, built to satisfy customers and the business. The two teams are frequently looking at the exact same touchpoints — the same loan application flow, the same patient intake process, the same claims experience — and producing two different, uncoordinated pictures of it, often without either team knowing in detail what the other found.
That duplication isn’t just inefficient. It means your compliance documentation and your actual customer experience improvement work rarely inform each other, and the organization effectively pays twice for insight into the same process it could have gotten once, more thoroughly, if the two efforts were designed together from the start.
What regulators in these industries are actually looking for
Across financial services and healthcare, the regulatory expectation increasingly isn’t just “treat customers fairly” as an outcome — it’s evidence of a systematic, ongoing process for finding and fixing where you aren’t. Fair lending and UDAAP-related reviews in financial services look for documented, proactive self-assessment, not just a clean complaint log. Patient experience standards in healthcare increasingly tie directly to things like CAHPS-style measurement and documented quality improvement processes, not just satisfaction scores reported upward once a year. In both industries, accessibility requirements for digital experiences — online banking, patient portals — are under increasing scrutiny on their own. What all of this adds up to is a consistent theme: proof that you looked, systematically and on a defensible cadence, matters as much as what you found.
Why a well-run CX audit produces exactly this kind of evidence
This is where the overlap gets genuinely useful instead of just theoretically interesting. A properly structured audit — validated personas, real journey mapping, an honest evaluation of existing complaint and service data, firsthand walkthroughs of the actual touchpoints, and benchmarking against what good looks like elsewhere — is, almost incidentally, precisely the kind of systematic, documented, dated process that compliance functions in these industries need to be able to point to. The commercial insight and the compliance evidence aren’t two different projects. They’re two outputs of the same rigorous process, if that process is designed with both audiences’ needs in mind from the outset rather than retrofitted afterward.
Timing matters more here than almost anywhere else
In most industries, a CX audit can happen whenever budget and bandwidth allow. In financial services and healthcare, timing it ahead of a scheduled exam or review changes its character entirely — it becomes proactive evidence of a mature process instead of a reactive scramble after a finding already landed. I’ve seen the difference in posture this creates firsthand: walking into a regulatory conversation with “here’s the systematic process we run and here’s what we found and fixed” is an entirely different position than walking in after a finding, trying to explain what you’re doing about it now that someone else noticed first.
Where to start
If your organization is in financial services or healthcare and hasn’t yet connected your CX and compliance efforts into a single, well-documented process, a Customer Experience Audit designed with both your commercial goals and your documentation needs in mind can serve both functions at once — worth coordinating with your compliance and legal teams on scope from the start. And if you want a sense of what unresolved experience gaps could be costing commercially, separate from the compliance conversation entirely, the CX ROI Calculator is a good place to start putting a number on it.
Image Credits: ChatGPT
Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.