Insights
What can credit unions and building societies learn from each other?
With both their roots firmly in the communities they serve, building societies and credit unions can learn from each other’s digital strategies.
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Insights
Disjointed systems, lack of automation, and manual processes are all too common for small to mid-sized financial services organisations. Often, customers are left in the dark waiting for status updates. If chaser calls are jamming your contact centre, you cannot scale cost-effectively. Here’s how to prevent chaser calls.
Disjointed systems, lack of automation, and manual processes are all too common for small to mid-sized financial services organisations. Often, customers are left in the dark waiting for status updates. If chaser calls are jamming your contact centre, you cannot scale cost-effectively. Here’s how to prevent chaser calls.
Plenty of digital-first businesses make it impossible or nearly impossible to speak to a human. Their strategy for scale is to avoid costly, resource-intensive human-to-human interaction.
Small to mid-sized financial services organisations don’t want to be this kind of faceless “Don’t call me, read our FAQs” corporation. They built their business on the pillars of convenience, customer intimacy, and expert service.
But customer intimacy and locale are diminishingly relevant. What’s more convenient — heading into town for face-to-face service from your local branch or a few taps on your smartphone app?
Customers that prefer the former to the latter are literally a dying breed. Any business that wants to scale cost-effectively needs to embrace digital self-service.
That doesn’t mean neglecting your in-branch experience and hiding your phone number. However, the benefits of channel shift should mean shorter queues at counters, fewer calls to your contact centre, lower operating costs, and the ability to assign customer service staff to more value-generating activities.
Customers that prefer the former to the latter are literally a dying breed. Any business that wants to scale cost-effectively needs to embrace digital self- service.
That doesn’t mean neglecting your in-branch experience and hiding your phone number. However, the benefits of channel shift should mean shorter queues at counters, fewer calls to your contact centre, lower operating costs, and the ability to assign customer service staff to more value-generating activities.
The problem
Sadly, for small to mid-sized banks and other financial services organisations, four barriers
stand in the way of providing a great digital customer experience:
If you have several core systems for current accounts, savings products, cards, and mortgages, providing a consistently brilliant digital customer experience is challenging. You need to develop a consistent all-encompassing self-service experience that works on the web and mobile.
Aged back-office tech is often hard to change and hard to integrate. This can lead to gaps filled by manual steps, such as rekeying data. Without straight-through processing, you’ll suffer high costs, and customers will receive slow and inadequate service.
The above challenges often result in siloed development — different channels or products digitized individually. The result is a complex and costly-to-maintain architecture and an inconsistent customer experience.
Small to mid-sized financial services organisations often lack the digital chops needed for rapid and successful digital transformation. The Learning & Work Institute says the UK is facing a severe digital skills shortage. The skills drought is particularly harsh on mid-tier banks and financial services firms. They lack the vast resources and budgets of big banks, big tech, and a slew of well-funded FinTech disruptors.
The Solution
We are a UK-based team of financial services technology and customer experience experts. At the core of our company is a passion and belief in the power and potential of technology. We’ve been applying technology, such as banking apps to solve business problems since 1986.
We provide Interact, a web, and mobile-ready platform to transform your entire customer experience. It provides a suite of pre-built, pre-integrated, easy-to-configure services that work alongside your core banking systems. Interact includes:.
Customer onboarding
Digital Banking
Mortgage product switching
Digital debt recovery
Interact
Interact
Benefits
Here are just a few of the ways that Interact will have your customers reaching for their browser or smartphone rather than clogging the phones of your contact centre:
Account opening and onboarding
Digital Laggards lack integration and automation. They often use paper- based application forms and web forms that result in little more than an email to a shared inbox. Applicants wait while staff perform slow, repetitive, and error-prone tasks. Decisions can take days, and the execution cost is sky-high, especially considering the high abandonment rate.
Customers are very prone to make chaser calls. And they may need to visit a branch to prove their identity.
Integrate your web and mobile customer onboarding experience with back-office systems. Use third-party AI-powered web services for
KYC and AML checks, credit risk checks, and more. Automate every step of the onboarding process—making the customer experience lightning quick and the straight-through execution cost minimal.
100% digital. No need to call the contact centre or visit a branch.
When savings products or fixed-rate mortgage periods mature
Laggards use a chaotic combination of core systems, data extracts, spreadsheets, marketing/email automationsystems, web pages, online forms, and shared email inboxes. Such friction-filled chaos wastes human resources and is a compliance risk in waiting. Many customers switch to alternative lenders — especially when fixed-term mortgage periods mature.
Customers are likely to call or go elsewhere due to an awful experience. Customer service staff cannot prioritise whom to call.
Leaders provide a frictionless experience integrated across email and self-service channels. They provide all the information needed to compare mortgage account offers side-by-side. Personalised illustrations andthe acceptance process are
automated, secure, and compliant. Switching is easier for customers, retention rates are higher, and operating costs are much lower.
Most customers switch products digitally. Fewer inbound calls. Customer service staff can see who’s interested and prioritise productive calls.
Current accounts, Savings accounts, Cards and Mortgages switching
and mobile banking user experiences are disjointed, uncompetitive, slow to change, and expensive to maintain. They might need to manage multiple log-ins. Back-office integration is lacking, leading to delays and manual work for the operations team.
When your digital experience is poor, channel shift goes the wrong way — more phone calls and counter visits.
Digital leaders provide everything you’d expect from the best online and mobile banking experience. Unified, secure access to all
accounts, cards, savings, and mortgages. Back-office integration ensures frictionless service. And it’s quick and cost-effective to
update whenever new products or marketing changes require.
A brilliant digital self-service experience delivers a channel-shift advantage — helping your business scale cost-effectively.
Allow your customers to resolve overdue payments anytime, anywhere
Digital laggards struggle with collections. Attempts to help customers in arrears lack automation and self-service capabilities. Manual
processing is both inefficient and adds compliance risk. Cases are slow to resolve, and less debt is collected.
Laggards cannot afford to help distressed clients. Given the current cost of living crisis, profits will suffer.
Digital leaders provide self-service guidance to customers in debt. Automation makes it cost-effective and easy to comply with regulations. Agents have more time to resolve complex cases and help vulnerable customers. Cases are faster to resolve, and more debt is collected.
Leaders use digital self-service and automation to help distressed customers and collect more debt cost-effectively.
Case Study
In this short case study, learn how ieDigital helped Cambridge & Counties Bank launch online savings self-service for SMEs using the Interact application suite. Benefits include 100 percent digital onboarding, financial crime protection, frictionless self-service options, and increased capacity for the operations team.
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Platform
A suite of pre-built pre integrated easy to configure services that work alongside your system.
Modules
with Interact Acquire
Easy onboarding and personalised account management without visiting a branch.
with Interact Switch
Increase mortgage retention rates allowing customers to compare multiple mortgage products.
with Interact Connect
Self-service banking giving customers full control of their products and services.
with Interact Collect
Improve collection performance with a fully customisable self-service platform.