Financial organizations must augment their strategy to adopt digital transformation to compete in the digital ecosystem. They must maneuver the technology’s real value from automation and cost minimization to delivering engaging experiences.
Banks must embrace digital transformation to stay relevant in the evolving digital landscape. Providing more agile and customer-centric services will allow them to avoid the risk of losing customers.
Here are the top digital transformation considerations for financial organizations.
Pivot Digital Banking Experiences
Banks must diligently offer intuitive and easy-to-use digital solutions by enabling personalized digital engagement for the customer throughout their journey. The risk of not delivering a robust digital customer experience pushes the banks to transform into tech-enabled firms.
Financial organizations must identify projects to enhance experiences and prioritize efforts by consistently training their employees. They must provide a seamless digital customer experience due to the increasing number of clients demanding a smooth consumer journey with valuable digital interaction.
Banks must enhance digital solutions- online and mobile-responsive websites, mobile banking apps, and remote depositing services for a robust customer experience across all channels.
These digital solutions enable banks to reimagine customer journeys, deliver personal insights and offer real-time advice. It improves operational efficiency and maximizes market share in a competitive ecosystem.
Bridging the Gaps Between Digital and Physical Channels
Financial organizations must upgrade their branches and achieve product distribution fit by delivering products and services that consumers can access via numerous channels. They must re-assess their branch strategies and digital product distribution capabilities as customers transact through multiple channels, including physical and virtual locations like smartphones.
Banks’ branches play a significant role in delivering customer experience since they are responsible for establishing unique digital channels. It allows customers to transact anytime, whether digitally or physically. More importantly, a typical branch’s capabilities will evolve from meet-and-greet service counters to communal kiosks providing numerous services.
Digital is the Primary Channel
Traditional banking has been through physical channels; however, the digital channel is gaining the edge with digital transformation initiatives. Banks are transitioning to digital tools, while the self-service digital channel is also evolving due to increasing customer demand.
Moreover, manual operations are shifting into the digital realm while products that require offline execution- physical signatures and mortgage loans are also moving into digital space with technology like eSignatures or face recognition.
Single Touchpoint to a Complete Customer Journey
The rise in mobile financial apps is driving mobile banking usage. With customers preferring mobile apps over other channels for transacting and checking balances, banks invest in developing high-quality applications to reduce friction and increase convenience.
Not only mobile apps financial organizations must deploy technology for bank employees by empowering them with the right tools to solve issues proactively. Deploying virtual assistants is crucial today, so businesses focus on building their capabilities and the basic skill sets required to leverage the technology.
Combining face-to-face interactions with staff and digital channels ensures an enhanced customer experience. Banks must carefully manage their current network and the capabilities they need from the physical branches. Moreover, banks must explore the opportunity to develop a multi-channel approach by investing in new technologies such as digital kiosks, virtual assistants, and interactive tables.
Also Read: Five Common Challenges of Digital Transformation in Finance
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology
The imperative to meet customer needs is why banks embrace digitization and AI. Expectation enforced during the pandemic has made consumers more reliant on digital platforms.
The increasing number of digital assistants affects the financial services in customer service, how financial service providers communicate with customers, and enhancements required in the existing technology.
Customer service will be personalized, efficient, and intuitive due to virtual assistants, chatbots, and digital customer support services. Simultaneously, there is a likeability of the customer to change banks when their experience with mobile banking is subpar.
Businesses can avoid this fate by offering a customized, friction-free digital banking journey – from offers, reminders, and notifications with the help of AI. AI ensures that businesses retain the human touch that sustains customer relationships.
Banks have the potential to pave the way for a less artificial future but are still quite intelligent if they are steadfast in their commitment to utilizing technology. This approach improves relationships and allows businesses to plan their innovation strategies meticulously.
No More Manual Processes
Overwhelming paperwork has been the standard functionality in the banking industry; however, it is not sustainable. Banks must diminish the inefficient paper pushing and need to station the required solutions to enhance customer experience.
With the normalization of eSignatures and digital forms, customers expect to complete their activities via digital tools, from account opening to mortgaging loans and payments.
Therefore, they must find ways to digitize their operations, enabling employees to focus on the activities rather than processing mundane documents. Despite embracing technology, banks face significant issues when at a faster rate than it comes to customer service.
Automation enhances the agents’ efforts to provide rapid responses; however, it is never a replacement for emotional intelligence and human empathy, a crucial factor in building customer connections.
Employee Empowerment and Delivery of Personalized Digital Products
Work-from-home and on-sign employee management needs a balance of efficiency and empowerment. Employee-focused technologies that promote teamwork and efficient collaboration are the current standards. Therefore, inward-facing innovation might become a key focus in the finance industry.
Moreover, offering customers a particular product at a specific price can accelerate the sale probability policy. Delivery of tailored digital products will likely become the focus for financial organizations in 2023 and beyond.
Conclusion
Banks will need to think about how they can empower employees and update processes and technology to transform the customer experience in their branches. It must align with digital innovation, employee engagement, and product development to implement digital transformation initiatives successfully.
