Intelligent Communications, the future of customer satisfaction

What do your customers really experience when they contact your company? Do they feel “recognised”? Is the treatment they receive “personal”? Does your service help you keep customers or are you giving them reasons to go to your competitors? Today financial services firms are in a great position to leverage their relationship with their customers to increase sales by adopting communications as a strategic business differentiator. And satisfied customers are the best guarantee of stability and growth.

Today’s CEOs of banks, insurance companies, capital markets firms, and other financial service organisations need to constantly find new ways for their organisations to deliver the superior customer experience that will help ensure customer loyalty and strengthen their brand. Communications is becoming truly strategic and is now at the top of the boardroom agenda, identified as a potential weapon in the battle for corporate growth allowing you to address customer needs promptly, personally and holistically while making the best use of your resources.

A recent report published by PriceWaterhouseCooper jointly with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) noted that 67 percent of senior financial services executives said that improving IT systems is their company’s top strategic priority for the next 12 months as firms aim to retrieve relevant customer data in real time and to analyse customer behaviour in order to anticipate and meet needs. “The winners in the financial services will be companies that improve their IT Systems, create customer focused information and invest in their people,” says Steve Davies, partner, PriceWaterhouseCooper.

Banks have already started successfully investing in and using technology. “A key part of our technology mission at Morgan Stanley is to continually enhance our service delivery capability through the integration of cutting edge technology that helps us meet challenges and capitalise on the opportunities in today’s ever changing environment“ says Steve Ruegnitz, managing director Institutional Securities Group, Morgan Stanley. 

As a result, building an Intelligent Communication strategy, whereby previously isolated communication systems and media are fully integrated within the business, should be a key strategic goal for all financial organisations.

To achieve Intelligent Communications, four main steps should be taken into consideration. This approach takes into account existing investment.  Each strand brings its own business benefits meaning that even before full integration has been achieved, the Board can begin to register tangible return on investment (ROI) on the balance sheet.

Converged communications

Many financial organisations have already taken a first step towards Intelligent Communications. By turning to IP (Internet Protocol) to provide fixed-line voice telephony, alongside traditional data services, many global organisations have already reaped the cost benefits of VoIP (Voice over IP) communications. This convergence phase demonstrates immediate ROI and lays the infrastructure for future unified and intelligent communications phases. The impact on day-to-day business is minimal, as users existing work patterns are unaffected by the transition.

Unified communications

Once an IP infrastructure has been successfully implemented, major incremental benefits are within grasp.

Unified Communications builds on the IP network to enhance worker productivity through the integration and connection of diverse communication tools to facilitate true worker collaboration. This provides an integrated environment that allows users to communicate across a wide range of devices and applications such as email on a PC, PDA or smartphone; web, video and audio conferencing; instant messaging and voice calling. By integrating these previously stand-alone applications, and utilising open standards such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), users obtain a clear, real-time view of an individual’s “presence” or availability. This avoids wasting time and money leaving voicemails on both mobile and fixed-line phones, sending email to various addresses or checking an instant messenger window status.

If individuals can contact each other more efficiently, time wasted on failed contact is reduced and productivity naturally increases. Indeed, The Yankee Group estimates that productivity can improve by 15-20% per day by eliminating the need to change between different communication platforms.

Unified Communications clearly represents added value, and taking a layered architecture approach to it does not require businesses to make existing investments redundant. 

Customer contact

Providing superior customer contact experiences can significantly help in delivering customer satisfaction. As the third vital element in the evolution towards Intelligent Communications, customer contact is being redefined to embrace the business as a whole and not just the contact centre. 

Today, there are around nine million employees worldwide able to connect to customers via traditional contact centres. However, another 100 million interface daily with customers in less structured environments. In many cases, these employees play an equally important role in satisfying customer needs. By integrating solutions using SIP technologies, the presence of back office experts is readily available to front line agents who can bring specific expertise into a customer conversation as and when required. 

Customers are notoriously unforgiving. They value their own approach and are frustrated if their “suppliers” fail to meet them on their terms. This applies to both the means of communication (be it via human or automated call centres, email, instant messaging via a company’s website, etc) and the “effort” made by the company to understand them and their relationship history.

Intelligent Communications allows all members of an organisation to interact with customers in a structured way, allowing the customer to speak to the person best suited to their inquiry. This employee could be located in a call centre, head office, home office or virtually anywhere. By creating an “enterprise ready to serve” all employees are able support their organisation’s customer care standards, directly contributing to long-term business success.

Communication enabled business processes

The final stage in the corporate journey to Intelligent Communication pools all elements of the business communication and operational processes in order to dramatically change the way businesses operate.

Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) provides a unifying platform between a company’s business systems and it’s unified communications assets.  Implemented appropriately, it leads to improved business process efficiency and execution. But beyond this, it will enable organisations to design and evolve truly integrated business processes that fully leverage the power of business and communications systems for the first time.

But what is CEBP? In many business processes, employees are required to take action to fix process outages when they occur. Often this involves escalating the issue to multiple higher authorities to determine what action should be taken. It can be a very manual and very time-consuming process. CEBP helps streamline the rectification of the problems by removing human latency and speeding up time it takes to register an outage and decide what actions should be taken to resolve the situation. CEBP helps automate operational efficiency, worker productivity and customer satisfaction by streamlining human engagement in critical business processes. Communication solutions integrate with business applications to predict and sense events, then respond by setting up and managing real-time communication with process users and decision-makers or through notification to the customer.

Virtually any business in any industry can benefit from communications enabling their business processes.

For the purpose of this article let’s see how CEBP can transform a Financial Services organisation. Due to system limitations and high service costs it is common practice for banks only to call customers regarding critical business issues for instance for debt collection or sales lead generation. Through the deployment of CEBP technologies business are now able to expand their communications profile to provide outbound customer service for a much broader range of business reasons. By allowing their internal business systems to sense or even predict events and deliver appropriate customer communications, a new era of customer satisfaction is within sight.

For example, notifying a customer that they are about to go overdrawn gives the customer time to move money from a savings account and avoid charges. With CEBP all this happens automatically, only requiring human intervention when absolutely necessary.

In essence, CEBP helps financial organisations enhance operational efficiency, worker productivity and customer satisfaction by streamlining human engagement in critical business processes. Communication solutions integrate with business applications to predict and sense events, then respond by setting up and managing real-time communication with process users and decision-makers or through notification to the customer.

The benefits

As this article has already touched upon, technology “for technology’s sake” is an empty promise. Today, any investment must be scrutinised to evaluate its impact on the bottom line now, and in the future. Intelligent Communications represents a revolution both in terms of the mechanics of communication and its impact on the business models of the future. The advantages of such a path cannot be over-estimated. Evaluating Unified Communications alone, the analyst firm Gartner suggested recently (with an 80% probability) that by 2010, businesses that have implemented Unified Communications will have competitive and revenue advantages over those who haven’t. And that’s just step two on a journey towards true Intelligent Communications.

Intelligent Communications is perhaps viewed as a utopian view for now, but it is also eminently achievable and will prove crucial to long-term business success.

Financial services companies can use Intelligent Communication capabilities to create a flexible, global business model in which customers can be responded to at any point and time in the value chain, by the right person in real time.