Enhancing the Financial Services Customer Experience
The intersection of digital transformation and banking is redefining the customer experience in the financial services industry in Australia. With the help of emerging technologies and the automation of risk decisioning, banks are transforming the way they deliver financial services to their customers. Thanks to the ability to make faster, more accurate credit decisions and enabling more personalized product offerings, the financial services landscape is changing – for the better. This not only enhances the customer experience but also reduces risk – at onboarding, and throughout the entire customer journey. In this blog post, we will explore how banks can enhance the experience across the whole customer lifecycle and maximize customer value while still mitigating risk effectively.
Personalization is Positive
Personalizing the customer experience is now a core focus of banks when it comes to digital transformation – or should be. According to Salesforce, “only 16% of banking customers strongly agree that their vendors are interested in their financial wellbeing… And only 11% of banking consumers agree that companies anticipate their financial needs.” And only 38% of Australians said ‘very satisfied’ when answering a survey on satisfaction with their primary bank. In these days of digitized, instant, everything-on-demand services, that number just isn’t good enough.
The traditional approach of manual underwriting, analysis, and decisioning can take days or even weeks – and leaves little room for personalized, tailor offers. With automation, lenders can process applications in real-time, without sacrificing accuracy. This helps to reduce the time to decision – and paves the way for a much more customer-centric experience. But making an initial decision at onboarding is not the only way to improve the overall customer experience.
With the right decisioning solution, and a multitude of customer data available at their fingertips, banks can enhance experience throughout the entire customer journey – from application to collections and everything in between, including onboarding, fraud prevention, upsell/cross-sell opportunities and predicting defaults before a collections strategy is required. Using a variety of easily accessible data sources, as well as insights and advanced analytics, banks can more easily predict behavior patterns – like identifying customers who may be ready to refinance a mortgage, or take out a personal loan. Identifying the right offer at the right time for each individual customer is key to a) that personalized experience consumers are craving and b) maximizing your revenue from each of those individual customers.
Enhancing Each Stage of the Customer Journey:
- Application: Ensure ease in the application process with simplified, digitized processes.
- Onboarding: Integrate real-time data and automate decisions for rapid approvals, so you can onboard customers seamlessly.
- Upsell/Cross-Sell: Make the right offers to the right customers at the right time, with real-time dashboards and advanced analytics to predict the likelihood of acceptance.
- Customer Management: Get a holistic view of your customers across the entire customer journey, enabling that personalized experience they crave.
- Portfolio Management: Not just for customer views, look at entire areas of your portfolio with advanced analytics AI and machine learning to determine areas of improvement and enhance your overall strategic agility.
- Collections: Identify defaults before they happen, and determine the best collections strategies and communications channels for the customer that do default.
Moving Forward: A Customer-Centric Approach
Digital transformation and the automation of risk decisioning in banks is all about delivering exceptional customer experience. The application process, onboarding activities, upsell/cross-sell opportunities, customer management phase, and portfolio management all intersect and are critical to delivering a great customer experience in the banking industry. This intersection should not be viewed as a threat to traditional banking. Instead, we should consider it as a step forward. The technology provides room for banks to move towards a more customer-centric approach. Overall, the bank’s ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience will increase brand loyalty, customer retention, and revenue, leading to long-term and sustainable corporate growth.