Customers Demand a Single View From Their Banks
By Marcia Wakeman, Partner, North American Banking Practice, Capco (New York)
Communicating with customers requires adept management of inbound and outbound messages across multiple channels — branch, call center, online, mobile and traditional mail — all while accommodating customer preferences. In the case of outbound communications, automated tools are essential for content authoring, workflow management, document creation, review and approval — including legal and compliance steps — and multichannel delivery. These tools can manage the content, branding and integration with customer data, all of which are necessary to create accurate, timely, and targeted communications to your customers.
Customers should be able to select different channels (e.g., email, text message, online, etc.) for different types of messages, such as account statements and balance alerts. The ability to manage their preferences, including unsubscribing from feeds that no longer interest them, is key to maintaining trust and customer loyalty.
In addition, financial institutions need to improve their management of inbound communications. More and more, customers want the ability to send electronic communications but find that their banks do not allow this. Banks need to invest in systems to automate the processing of customer-provided electronic documents and management of unstructured data.
As far as customers are concerned, there are no differences among business units within an institution, and they do not understand why the communications cannot be the same across the board. They don't know or care about channels, lines of business, or systems and database challenges. Customers expect you to bring the same knowledge to each interaction that they have; the individual or system providing service should have access to relevant communications — statements, marketing offers, service requests and historical interactions — on a time-sensitive basis.
