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December 21, 2023The Power of Moving Forward Faster with Agility, Flexibility, and Responsiveness
Investment Firms, Insurance Companies, and Financial Services organizations including Credit Unions (FSI’s for short) are typically limited in their operational flexibility due to the state of their existing infrastructure and systems.
The reality is that these organizations can’t or are unwilling to replace their core systems any time soon, due to cost, proprietary technologies, or archaic data structures.
Hybrid Helps Things Happen
This is where extending the life-cycle of legacy technologies becomes a key enabler. A hybrid approach enables organizations to easily combine the best of old and new.
By leveraging their legacy technologies and complementing them with the flexibility of an over-the-top (OTP) digital application layer, minimizes operational disruption while enabling these organizations to continue using data from those legacy systems.
The result is that they can start benefiting from enhanced operational capabilities more quickly than would otherwise be possible.
As this new and highly dynamic customer experience layer is loosely coupled with the traditional core systems, innovation can more easily be integrated into the FSIs infrastructure.
Leveraging the slow, steady and rock-solid legacy systems at the core along with innovative and instantaneous capabilities at the digital level, empowers these organizations to keep pace with market demands.
As We All Know – It’s Not Just Voice Anymore.
It’s a no-brainer. A fully integrated omni-channel approach is now the expectation. A member may choose to start the application process for a new financial product (loan, mortgage, business line of credit) on their tablet, and then complete the process later on a desktop, and sign off at the branch. Clients, customers, or members must be empowered to choose whatever solution best meets their needs at any moment in time.
It’s Dynamic!
As a complicating factor, client and member’s needs are never static. The Credit Unions that continuously look forward will be able to maintain a competitive advantage and benefit from the increased flexibility that digital technology provides them. Those that don’t, won’t.
Designing and refining the omni-channel experience never stops, even after the completion of all project milestones. It’s an ongoing process, not only creating the best possible experience at that moment in time, then analyzing feedback and results, and continuously refining and optimizing.
FSI’s and Credit Unions must adopt the customer experience (CX) development approach being taken by all digital platforms. Termed “Fast Fail” by Google, new capabilities are developed at a very fast pace and quickly rolled out to the market. Then user adoption rates, activity, and feedback are closely tracked, compiled, and analyzed to determine if the enhancement is meeting expectations. If not, it’s modified/refined until its performance meets those expectations… or it is abandoned.
Underpinning everything these days is the requirement to improve communications and collaboration across the whole organization so that FSI clients or Credit Union members are quickly served and that their issues, needs, or requests are correctly resolved – the first time.
Integrating Unified Communications (UC) helps organizations achieve better results more efficiently, and effectively. UC enables staff to see who is available (using Presence indicators) and then enables instant communication and collaboration, including document sharing, video chats, SMS, emails, and calls between tellers, loan officers, back-office staff, or executive decisions makers. No matter where they are, in another office or on the road.
Using a broadly deployed solution such as Microsoft Teams means that an organization can easily leverage technology that’s already in place (over 80% of Fortune 500™ Companies use Teams ) while benefitting from using the desktop interface that everyone is already comfortable using. No learning curve, adoption rate issues, or unwelcomed workflow changes.
Integrating UC or cloud-based UC as a Service (i.e. UCaaS) ensures that the right person, can make the right decision, with all available information, quickly and in the best interest of all parties.
Focus On Enhancing the Overall Experience – It’s the winning choice.
If it’s not intuitive (read SIMPLE) and doesn’t deliver the capabilities or results expected – the client/member experience you are trying to improve will be negatively impacted.
After too many disappointments, they will leave. The right decisions will deliver the improvements needed while also minimizing your downside risk. Consider your technology choices as client engagement enablers, with a view to what you need now and how these capabilities can evolve in the future.