A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.

Appian

Karen Astley, Vice President, APAC

Using Data to Elevate Employee and Customer Experience in Financial Services

Karen Astley

In today’s digital economy, financial institutions must constantly innovate to find faster, more efficient and convenient ways that enable people and businesses to transact, offer and receive credit, and manage investments. The future growth and development of financial institutions depend on their ability to deliver these services in alignment with the way people live and work, today. Making data-driven decisions to solve these challenges is critical to a bank’s success and its ability to effectively enable the digital economy.

With a focus on data and orchestration of processes, financial institutions can deliver necessary customer and employee experiences to fuel their continued growth. While there is much talk about the importance of customer experience, it is equally important to focus on internal stakeholders, as engaged employees deliver stronger customer experiences. Data-driven customer experience delivers as many benefits to financial institutions as it does to customers.

Reducing complexity through seamless orchestration of processes and providing access to actionable data empowers and engages employees. With a unified technology platform, financial institutions can easily link back-end processes with front-end services or interfaces, providing employees with the right data at the right time. This simplicity gives greater ability to target specific customers, achieve consistency across channels, and enhance the ability to predict customer requirements. Never mind the benefit of retaining agents, as employee attrition can erode customer satisfaction while increasing operating costs in training, direct recruiting, and lost productivity during ramp up. According to research, organizations that offer a great employee experience outperformed the S&P by 122%.

Here are three areas that enhance customer and employee experience:

Culture

Providing access to the tools necessary for enhanced customer and employee experience requires cross-departmental cooperation, which can represent a cultural transformation within a financial institution.

If departmental silos constrict access to data and capabilities, financial institutions will not be able to achieve seamless omnichannel service. Across the organization, there must be a dedication to breaking down the silos that traditionally exist between business and IT, and a commitment to adopting a culture of innovation and thinking from the “outside-in” about the customer journey.

A clear vision based on research, patience and careful collaboration will promote innovation and new products designed to serve customers. The functional teams will be free to explore offerings in newer technologies like open APIs and Open Banking to increase financial transparency and widen the scope of applications and services that a financial institution can bring to its customers. For example, a culture of collaboration will allow teams to thoughtfully incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI / ML) for fraud detection, risk management, trading, lending, investment advice and other services — while carefully considering philosophical questions concerning whether a machine could ever simulate human intelligence and what the ethics of doing that would be.

Technical Debt

Technical debt reflects the cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution over the right solution. It also reflects the lost opportunity cost that a financial institution incurs either by not developing a requisite application to take advantage of a market opportunity, or by creating an application that does not meet business requirements. The negative impact of technical debt is higher operating expenses, development delays, and reduced performance. To combat this, financial institutions need to look for new ways to accelerate application development using enterprise low-code development platforms that speed up the build process with robust but easy-to-use drag-and-drop visual design tools. With these platforms, employees will be able to spend less time maintaining legacy systems, and more time on creating innovative new tools to improve the customer experience.

Intelligent Automation

Intelligent automation combines the speed and power of business process management, machine learning, and robotic process automation with low-code development, and can improve the high volume and rules-based back-office functions. These functions require a lot of human support, and since they are not typically revenue-generation area shaving little direct interaction with customers, they are a prime candidate for intelligent automation.

There are also significant efficiencies to be gained in front-office processes around client on-boarding, transaction monitoring, fraud prevention and the contact center. Natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis can add tremendous value to a financial institution’s contact center. The immediacy of the data available is much more actionable than what you could obtain from post-call surveys. The technology can help determine the future action of customers, and can be matched with purchase or churn data for continuous feedback into the overall health of the business. Successful financial institutions are realizing significant business benefits from a low-code platform strategy that includes intelligent automation for more efficiency, fewer errors, improved regulatory compliance, and increased customer satisfaction.

The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.