Blending automation, human touch, and cross-channel collaboration to drive banking growth

Customers in today’s digital banking market expect a seamless, consistent experience whether they’re transacting online, through an app or in person at their local branch.

This expectation places mounting pressure on banks to up their game and seek ways to provide a collaborated experience across channels while becoming more efficient, reducing costs, and driving additional revenue growth. That’s no small feat in an environment of historically higher and uncertain-from-here interest rates, as well as differing consumer segment expectations.

Consistency across channels

Previously, in-person conversations allowed bankers to understand customer needs, answer questions and suggest relevant services. Now, with the rise of digital banking, automation has taken center stage in replicating that level of service across multiple touchpoints.

Adopting smart technologies that offer personalized, data-driven guidance ensure banks can provide a seamless and consistent experience across both digital and traditional channels. Selecting the right technology is vital for boosting customer satisfaction and achieving a strong return on investment.

By leveraging analytics, to detect issues and root causes, while leveraging workflow-based platforms, banks can better support individual customer journeys while adapting to unique financial situations. Solutions should include automation that enables banks to:

• Unify channel experiences – Customers increasingly expect control and flexibility, whether interacting online or in a branch. Technology should support consistent experiences across all channels. For example, a customer branch staff can use integrated tools like universal desktops or intelligent contact centers to meet more complex customer needs. Building this Cross Channel cohesion helps banks retain customers and foster growth.
• Identify and manage risk – Transitioning to digital creates new risk areas, such as identity verification, credit evaluation and customer churn. Banks can better manage these risks by adopting automated underwriting, advanced decision-making systems and dynamic pricing based on risk. These tools not only reduce costs but also help banks stay ahead of potential issues while safeguarding both existing and future revenue.
• Embrace versatile technology – A diverse suite of digital tools can support banks across the board—from improving the overall customer experience and managing risk, to attracting new clients, optimizing internal processes and making data-backed decisions that drive long-term success.
• Strengthen revenue streams – Enhance lead generation, acquisition, retention and deepen existing relationships. Automation can help reduce the high rates of application abandonment through targeted follow-ups and campaigns as well as empathetic personalized engagement.

Addressing roadblocks in cross channel collaboration

The digital environment is rich with new opportunities for customer acquisition and engagement. However, taking advantage of these opportunities requires banks to tackle the evolving challenges in an omni-delivery ecosystem.

Customers have a plethora of choices at their fingertips and have no issue taking their business elsewhere if they become frustrated due to fulfillment friction, cumbersome processes, lack of access to human assistance and failure to meet service expectations. Failing to address these factors degrades customer confidence, ultimately leading to abandonment and reputational risk.

There are several key actions banks can take to address these issues and become an appealing choice for customers:

• Engage and influence consumers early in the customer journey by aligning their needs with targets and relevant information.
• Encourage collaboration with staff across channels, giving customers the option to start, stop and resume fulfillment in their channel of choice.
• Detect and reduce friction in processes, especially those resulting in abandonments, and automatically reengage customers with targeted programs to ensure fulfillment completion.
• Smoothly onboard customers into the service phase while maintaining customer loyalty and identifying future purchase stage opportunities.

Meeting customer needs and expectations requires a broad approach to fulfillment by understanding the full customer journey. Simply taking a bolt-on approach to fulfillment leads to frustration and explains why customers vanish before completing a purchase or application.

Modernizing branch and teller capabilities

Consumer preference has shifted to include more digital self-service technology options. This has sparked a decline in branch traffic in broad terms, but shifted demand toward specialized branch uses. Modernizing branch assets broadens a bank’s effectiveness across the entire customer journey.

As the need and demand for digital self-service options increases, banks need to utilize solutions that offer a seamless cross channel collaboration approach to transaction processing, allowing the institution to effectively meet customer needs wherever they choose to transact business. With such a solution in place, customer experience is enhanced, and banker efficiency is increased by allowing customers to resume a partially completed account application, started through digital channels but completed with the assistance of branch staff.

Bankers’ access to customer insights can positively affect customer engagement. While digital adoption reduces staff contact with customers, a consolidated view of customer information and activity increases the staff’s ability to optimize each customer interaction.

Even bankers that are processing monetary transactions should have a 360-degree view of institutional knowledge, including information obtained through digital and human channels. This provides bankers with powerful visibility into the customer’s needs and the state of the relationship to improve the level of service. It also equips staff to increase engagement relevance by focusing on immediate needs as well as long-term financial goals, deepening the relationship and building trust.

Todd Robertson is SVP at ARGO.