.svg)
In business banking, customer experience is about more than service quality; it’s also about how well a bank delivers on its customers’ unique needs. Businesses are not one-size-fits-all. So their needs, preferences and expectations are wildly different. We conducted research to learn how businesses experience their primary bank's CX, and the data uncovered powerful insights.
Our 2025 Business Banking Customer Experience Report reveals that business customers across different bank types have unique profiles. We dive into the expectations and perceptions they have for onboarding, support and overall satisfaction, comparing them across commercial, community and online banks as well as credit unions to find similarities and differences. One thing is clear: business banking customers can't be treated as a monolith.
Those banks and credit unions that rely on universal CX strategies for all of their business customers will have weaker relationships and higher attrition, which explains the buzz around journey orchestration as a tactic to hold onto bank clients.
The Differences in Business Banking Customers
Banks have traditionally drawn in different types of customers based on their product mix, geography and strengths. That remains true today, although the landscape is shifting as businesses seek out conveniences and partnerships that advance their goals.
.png)
Takeaways:
- Commercial banks still dominate and have the broadest range of business sizes in their portfolio; they are especially strong with companies that have 50+ employees.
- Community banks and credit unions serve a high proportion of sole proprietors and small businesses (2–49 employees), which may reflect their local roots and commitment.
- Online banks primarily serve smaller businesses and have few companies with 500+ employees.
Each group has a different set of frustrations, expectations, digital comfort levels and preferences. These differences matter - they should impact how a bank shapes its offerings and operations to retain and win more customers.
Is Bank Onboarding Easy? Not Quite.
On the surface, bank product onboarding appears to be smooth sailing: most customers say it was “mostly easy.”
The option that best describes your MOST RECENT business banking product/service onboarding experience?
However, another picture emerged when asked to choose the words that described the journey.
- Only 28% describe bank onboarding as “transparent”
- Just 31% say it was “seamless”
- Just over half found it “efficient”
- Nearly 1 in 5 said it was “high effort”
When broken out by bank type, other pictures emerged that highlight unique friction points by banking provider:
- Commercial bank customers describe onboarding as "easy" and “smooth,” but only 30% call it "transparent."
- Credit union members and online bank customers have the highest numbers of clients who see onboarding as "high effort" and "confusing."
- Community banks had the lowest number of businesses to describe onboarding as "seamless" and "smooth."
Not a single bank cracked 30% of customers who thought onboarding was transparent, and in other places in the research, this sentiment was echoed by other responses that pointed to communication and information gaps. The insight? Even when onboarding checks all the boxes, it doesn’t feel effortless or easy to understand. Dig deeper into the onboarding data in our CX Report.
Abandonment Affected By Level of Feeling Valued
Customers and members across all banks tend to stick around when they feel more valued by their banking provider, which correlates with lower abandonment rates. The difference is particularly stark for commercial banks and community banks.
Support Needs Vary — Because Customers Vary
Once onboarding is done, support takes over as the main driver of loyalty and trust. It is where all of the things promised in the sales and onboarding journeys come to fruition. Again, different business banking customers/members expect very different things.
Universally, most business banking customers rank responsiveness and speed as their highest priorities when seeking out customer support across the board. However, the way they want to receive that support varies.
- Credit union customers named their highest priority as being able to easily talk with a real person in customer support and it was also important to commercial and community banks.
- Not surprisingly, online bank customers are least interested in talking with a live person, and instead, place a premium on how well their problem is solved and how quickly.
- Online bank customers also prioritize having a variety of support channels more than other banking customers, which again aligns with the way they onboard and interact with digital-only banking providers.
Different financial providers attract unique customer/member bases that want banking delivered in specific ways. Therefore, there’s not a single support strategy that works for all banks - journeys need to be curated and personalized to match each business’ wants.
What Frustrates Business Banking Customers the Most?
Ongoing frustrations and inefficiencies in delivering the customer experience can quietly erode trust. As various industry studies from Accenture, J.D. Power, Financial Brand and others have highlighted, many customers don’t close their accounts when dissatisfied — they simply disengage. These ‘silent switchers’ begin using other providers while maintaining dormant relationships with their original banking providers.
This shift often flies under the radar, making it even more critical for institutions to proactively monitor engagement and resolve friction points before the relationship quietly fades.
Our research reveals notable differences in how various financial institutions handle customer concerns — and how that shapes the overall experience.The data shows that community banks are the most effective in resolving problems for their customers in a single contact. Across the board, however, most customers have to endure multiple engagements before they can work out issues.
In addition, the vast majority of business banking customers/members receive requests to repeatedly provide the same information over and over for a single issue, showcasing the disconnect between teams and departments within the same institution. This doesn’t even account for the fragmentation that happens when onboarding or support journeys include external partners that store customer interaction data in their own, siloed proprietary systems!
No single provider has cracked the code on seamless, holistic service delivery across teams, platforms and ecosystems. These operational disconnects underscore the importance of journey orchestration — ensuring every interaction is seamless, coherent, and aligned with customer expectations.
AI Support Comfort Level
As AI tools become more common in service environments, not all business banking customers are equally comfortable with them.
Comfort levels vary widely with AI support depending on the banking provider — and the customer segments they serve. Online bank customers are the most open to AI, with nearly two-thirds agreeing they’re comfortable to some degree using AI-based tools for support. This makes sense considering their using a digital-first provider.
Customers at credit unions and community banks are more hesitant and commercial bank customers fall in the middle, but each has a significant minority that’s still not comfortable using voice or chatbots to get banking help.
This divide underscores a key takeaway: AI support cannot be treated as a one-size-fits-all solution. To avoid adoption gaps or customer frustration, banks must orchestrate journeys that factor in comfort level, urgency, and issue complexity — giving every customer the right balance of automation and human support. Read more detail on AI support research here.
How to Win More of a Business' Banking Relationship?
Business customers, regardless of provider place great emphasis on having more smooth online and mobile banking experiences, with all except credit union clients naming it the #1 item on their wishlist. Credit union members instead ranked proactive, personalized recommendations as their top selection.
About a third of commercial and community bank clients cited expanded self-service options as a way to attract more of their business, which was higher than credit union or online bank customers. It's easy to conclude that business customers want 1) banking that works for them, at the time and in the channel they prefer and that can be very different depending on the company and 2) they want to be alerted to offers and services curated to their ultra-specific needs. These insights also confirm that digital fluency is now table stakes, and personalization has become a differentiator.
Why Journey Orchestration Is the Path Forward
As banking leaders work to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction in their CX value chain, the focus has shifted from optimizing isolated touch points to seeing, designing and guiding connected journeys comprised of a thread of interactions across people and systems. The research reinforces that inconsistency — often a byproduct of banking complexity — is the enemy of loyalty.
AI may be an answer to streamlining some of the disjointed, manual processes, but fragmented data is areal threat to AI implementation and innovation; it can undermine it before it can start.
Journey orchestration is gaining traction as one solution; it solves for many of the data challenges and unlocks opportunities to use intelligence to improve to elevate support team performance so it can offer higher-quality service.
Journey orchestration is about leveraging data to create efficiency, but it is really more about doing CX better with the data and knowledge a bank or credit union already has locked away in different places.
Journey orchestration equips different banks and credit unions to cater to their unique customer segments and preferences with greater agility more quickly.
Redesign the Business Banking Experience
Download the full Business Banking Customer Experience Report to learn more about the overall frustrations, preferences and experiences businesses have with their primary financial provider.
Then, if you are interested in tools that will help you deliver contextual, personal and seamless experiences to business customers, schedule a demo today to see how OvationCXM can transform your onboarding and support experience.
