Improving customer engagement/experience

Banking services have been transformed in recent years. Internet banking for basic statements and transactions is well established. Web banking has largely kept up with widening retail bank portfolios, making it easier for customers to keep track of their finances. There’s also a degree of customer web site interaction in the area of sales, product news, applications and messages.

This has been win-win for customers and banks.  Banks have seen dramatic transaction cost reductions, including electronic capture of transactions, with the elimination of the need to maintain or transcribe paper records into electronic systems.  Customers have gained free banking for current accounts.

Both have also gained in customer service.  Customers can transact and view information 24/7 - anywhere - yet still access branch staff if needed.  Banks have reduced the costs of pure transaction processing in the branch and focus typically prime located sites on pure retailing - marketing and sales of their ever-expanding product ranges. 

Customer segmentation has also grown, with products geared to different segments.  Customers with reasonable funds receive free financial advice in branch. 

So how could banks further increase sales, service and customer "engagement" - perhaps one area where the old world of "the bank manager" offered advantages over the new?

Technology brings opportunities.

Now they've moved much of the transaction execution burden to the web, banks have been able to re-orient their expensive branches into genuine sales outlets.  However, the very forces that helped web adoption - convenience and ever greater pressures on personal time - make many of them less likely to visit these "re-oriented" branches.  This may apply even more strongly to the most valuable customers.  At the same time, other trends have combined to increase both the competitiveness and complexity of retail banking.

Web banking has greatly lowered barriers to entry to retail banking, aiding the emergence of a new class of consumer banks - "retailers turned bankers" - Tesco, Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer. 

Furthermore, the bank now retails more financial products and services than ever before. 

Customers have thus become used to more products and services at lower costs but may be less inclined to visit the retail branch than before.  So how can banks respond?

We believe the next big step will be a step change in opportunities for engagement with customers, web-delivered in ever more personalised ways - and that integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suites may hold many of the keys to achieving that. 

Customer Service Engagement Portal - step change in aspiration

Now that many if not most customers - perhaps the majority for some of the most desirable customer segments - visit the web bank more than the branch, we need to understand how we can fulfil more of their needs through this channel.  Right now, the web tends to be "brochureware" and "transactionware".  Whilst web analytics may be more or less in play, checking customers' web-journeys, the banks may not be able to fully exploit these at a personal level, for reasons that are more than just technical.

To really explore the potential, we must adopt a new step change in aspiration:

"to combine the best of personalisation with a service experience that not only betters our current internet banking but even what we can deliver in the branch"

Here are some characteristics that may help define such an aspiration, yet still approach the "do-ability" and cost profiles of current web banking:

• Deliver the best expertise at the bank's command - the bank's greatest experts are rarely in the branch
• Do so 24/7 - clearly impossible at present
• Offer not just advice, but interaction with advice
• Dramatically upgrade the frequency and immediacy of advice for customers who invest via the bank
• Allow customers to use the more intrusive media, yet still "interact" with it.

Here are some services that could deliver against such a high expectation:

• Product suggestions, advice and qualification delivered by the bank's best experts in video, in formats that allow for designed interaction, questions etc., guided by electronically provided "KYC" details. Existing configurations can do this in screen-forms, but video advice delivery may be more "human" and compelling.
• Web analytics that can help the bank make well-guided, ethically supportable product suggestions to customers.
• Equally, new product launches that don't just provide features and figures, but also explain which customer profiles might most benefit from them
• Monthly, weekly (even daily?) video updates by key fund managers - market perspectives, movements and their views etc - in crisp 2-5 minute videos.
• Self qualification, with full guidance and e-sign-off, of "Know Your Customer" (KYC) documentation - this may still be physically verified with signatures via post and scanned back into the customer's records, or even with in-branch interviews once the customer has decided to commit. Fine-grained Digital Asset Management (DAM) can overcome concerns over video delivery of large files.
• Integrated social media allowed for wholly interactive dialogue for top-value customers with named bank contacts, for banks which do not yet trust email for two way dialogue with customers.

ECM provides full records and audit trails of what is delivered to a customer, managed, controlled, secure yet appropriately accessible, in line with company policy.

The banks can of course choose to support customers commensurately with their value (as today with money thresholds for certain product types etc.), encouraging customers to reach value thresholds.  Now, however, such decisions can drive more by management choice than cost parameters.

Keeping it all together.

We referred earlier to integrated ECM suites.  Such suites, now offered by just a handful of suppliers including Open Text, allow a vast range of content types to be created, managed, shared, secured, linked, searched and processed throughout their policy-determined life-cycle.  All such content can be integrated with such items as paper documents (scanned and meta-tagged), emails and other materials that help complete the 360-degree customer record - and records - and made available to service representatives at any bank location. And of course, different elements of the suite can "talk" to each other, removing many potential integration "headaches".  This world of data can be accessed via User interfaces already established in many banks also.

Sum-up

The next step in customer service - customer engagement via the web - is now ready to be made.  Open Text, unlike the majority of ECM vendors, is ready to deliver.  Many European banks already rely on Open Text for vital Content Management applications.

For more business solutions visit our EMEA site:
financialservices.opentext.com