Banks investing in customer experience have a 1.9 times higher recommendation rate, 1.9 times greater revenue share, and are 2.1 times more likely to up-sell or cross-sell products and services to existing customers.

As per Draup’s research, banks are scaling capabilities in mobility, analytics, cloud, blockchain, and RPA by partnering with niche service providers to achieve a high level of digitization.

Robotics Process Automation (RPA): RPA-enabled processes include report generation, order processing, and data entry tasks. Key engagement areas include account verification, document preparation, application processing, anti-money laundering, and fraud detection.

Case-in-point, Accenture’s partnership with JP Morgan Chase replaced the manual process of yearly financial statement generation.

Data analytics: Collaboration between banks, financial institutions, and service providers with complete analytics workflow expertise enables digital processes and impacts customer care. Risk analytics, regulatory analytics, and core process automation are key engagement areas.

Case in point, Citi Group, partnered with Tata Consultancy Services to create a central data repository for customer complaints across consumer businesses and migrate their existing database from Oracle to HBase.

Integrated Digitization

The digitization initiatives have a corresponding impact on human touchpoints both on the customer and employee sides. While some banks leverage digital for quick wins by enabling various touchpoints, others embark on a comprehensive exercise transforming services and touchpoints.

In addition to RPA and Data Analytics, some digital transformation initiatives are coupled with automation. Banks are introducing conversational interfaces such as chatbots for customer support and specialized service offerings in branches.

Impact of digitization on bank employees

Digitization disrupts tradition and creates organization-wide changes within the core business model and across processes, teams, and individual roles. Organizations must minimize disruption and simplify adoption. Let us understand the impact on employees.

1. Tellers to sellers – Tellers no longer merely execute transactions. They will take on the additional role of educating customers about banking products, financial instruments, and innovative services.
2. Minimized dependencies of back-office workers – Traditionally, a large team managed typical back-office tasks, namely, document processing, fraud detection, legal contract analysis, and anti-money laundering. AI and ML have minimized dependency on a large team, allowing a small, focused team to work on them.
3. Take on a supervisory role – AI/ML and RPA have automated workflows and manage customer service through chatbots displacing the existing workforce. On the flip side, they train to supervise bots and ensure quality.

Impact of digitization on customers

While traditional banks need to educate customers about the new touchpoints, internet-savvy customers have no problems with digital-only banks. Some of the changes customers will face are:

1. Improves online banking – As banks invest in digital, they decrease physical branches due to the high real-estate and associated price. While some elderly customers find it hard to work on a digital interface, in-person support could advise them to use digital and customize financial solutions. Not to be undone, digitization can shape suggestions based on user likes, dislikes, behavior, various searches, financials, etc., before even getting the user query.
2. Automates customer support – Automatic customer support is easily a favorite for retail banks. Though the answers are automated, they are often limited in terms of personalization. Banks have implemented voice assistants (VA) supported with predictive analytics to help streamline call centers operations and improve customer satisfaction by 20%. However, the reduction in customer care representatives further compounds this issue as customers are unable to access human support to revolve their queries.
3. Eases processes and integration challenges – It offers a virtual tour of the products and a single interaction point to view all the products. The integration lets the attachment of products to the user’s portfolio for easy tracking, eliminating the prospect of tracking products and applications separately. Hence no separate meeting for various applications is needed.
4. Personalizes services – Customers are always looking for services relevant to their current financial standing and future goals. Data analytics and automation and identify what customers want and deliver personalized support.

Integrating Customer Touchpoints, the Right Way

As per our research, 72% of all banks are digital. However, some banks may not have digitized across the front and back end. For a streamlined digitization program, banks must define a strategy. Let us look at some key strategy elements.

Implement smooth front to backend integration

Superficial transformation initiatives retain legacy applications at the back end and target only customer-facing interfaces, leading to employee challenges. Lack of synchrony between internal applications may lead to employee dissatisfaction, compromising the experience for customers too.

Financial institutions must leverage a comprehensive approach considering future requirements to enable end-to-end integrated digitization.

Supplement digital with the human customer service

Banks must incorporate options for customers to invoke human assistance over digital customer service to eliminate abandoned transactions. Further, they must use the right technology at the backend to enable omnichannel capabilities that smoothly switch between channels, finalizes transactions, customizes the appropriate services and products.

Use the right technology for frictionless transactions

Empowering bank employees with the right tool ensures faster and frictionless transactions for customers visiting branches, calling customer support, or employing mobile apps.

These tools can be software that unifies access across multiple applications and AI-driven product recommendation applications leveraging data from individual customer profiles.

Provide effective training

When implementing digital technology, banks must conduct effective training programs to teach employees to use digital touchpoints, important for bank employees. They may be required to teach customers about using digital, assist them in their transactions, and advise customers tailored to data.

What’s the Future for Banks?

Digitization initiatives can extend across new platforms, services, and customized offerings.

Banks are partnering with FinTech firms to enable blockchain-driven innovation.

They can gain a market share in peer-to-peer ending by implementing origination, servicing, and delinquency management technology.

They must invest in digitizing, consolidating, and upgrading core banking platforms, ultimately unifying employee and customer experiences.

A good employee experience at the backend will translate to a good customer experience. So, banks should use a holistic employee training strategy, incorporate human assistance across channels and touchpoints, provide employees with the right tools while ensuring a smooth integration between front and backend applications.

Draup for Sales can help banks take the lead in implementing cutting-edge solutions to build deeper relationships with customers. It assists service providers with real-time signals and identifies the automation trends through rigorous analysis of data points. Our insights can guide service providers to identify the right opportunities proactively.