The next frontier for digital is physical. Across industries, the new generation of intelligent products and solutions are moving into the physical environment leveraging next-gen digital technologies. Financial institutions like Banks and Credit Unions usually take the role of a “fast follower,” letting the larger organizations take the lead in innovation and transformation - learning from their mistakes.
This is no longer a viable strategy as consumers’ expectations are already far ahead of traditional players’ thinking. Costumers expect a seamless experience across devices anytime, everywhere. They insist their partner organizations know them, look out for them, reward them, and offer product/solution recommendations in real-time.
To stay relevant and cater to customers, banks will have to adopt newer technologies, digital strategies and set up robust operations. Investing not just in front-office digital initiatives, but also in digital enablers will bring about smart experiences across back-office, mid-office, and front-office processes. Without an end-to-end approach, banks would only be able to achieve partial incremental results such as cost reduction and efficiency.
Let’s take a look at the key enablers that help organizations deliver next-level of customer banking experiences:
- Extending banking realities with immersive experiences: Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have finally stepped into the banking sector to offer customers and employees rich visualization of data and services. With the immersive projection of immediate physical surroundings, employees can get a holistic view of the banking operations and workflow processes. It simplifies tedious tasks for analysts, including navigating through various tabs for different types of information that fall into the basket of banking. AR & VR also unifies the real estate and the banking experience for customers, which significantly reduces the hassles of scheduling appointments with sellers, agents, bankers and enables them to secure the property by making quick real-time transactions.
- Effectiveness meets Efficiency: In terms of improving the customer experience, it is chatbots that are currently the most visible form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) being adopted. New research from capital-markets research and consulting firm TABB Group, found that 67 percent of banks are actively using AI today. For example, Swedbank’s AI chatbot “Nina,” in addition to answering customer questions on an online chat platform, Nina can also pass on more complex calls to members of staff. The bot has managed to achieve a 78-percent first-contact resolution within the first three months, in addition to a customer adoption rate of 30,000 conversations per month during this time. Financial Services is data intensive and therefore a great candidate for AI automation.
- Personalized Enlightenment Across Channels: According to PwC’s 2018 Digital Banking Consumer Survey, the number of financial institutions that consumers use increased by 10% (from 3.1 to 3.4) between 2016 and 2018. Retaining customer and continuously engaging his needs becomes a challenge for banks, personalized services can directly help form tighter bank-consumer relationships and will grow in importance for customer retention.
By understanding the unique customer persona, banks can move beyond the current one-size-fits-all approach to initiate more direct and personal conversations. To know more schedule a meeting with HARMAN experts. You can reach out to us here or on Linkedin or Twitter.
