Customer Interaction Management - the human face of channel banking

In everyday interactions with customers-phone, email, self-service, chat, and even social media-there are huge opportunities to dramatically reduce costs, make customers happier, and outpace competitors. The hard part is making sense of what's happening across all those channels and customer touch points and figuring out what to do about it.
A new approach changes all that!Customer Interaction Management (CIM) describes this complex, ongoing maze of interactions between customers and organisations across all touch points. Like all social dynamics, this exchange involves people. So it is by nature complex, chaotic-and messy.Consider the following scenario:Adam needs some post-dated cheques for his newly rented house and realises his cheque book is out; he goes to his bank's website to fill out a "cheque book request form".When he submits the form, he gets an error. So he goes to the live chat and explains the problem to a representative. The representative tells him, "That happens sometimes. Just try it again". Adam feels the representative isn't being very helpful but replies "thank you" anyway.Adam tries again and gets the same error.In frustration, he calls the bank's contact center and goes through the problem once again. After being on hold for several minutes, the agent identifies the problem. Since, the error had occurred while submitting the form, the agent is not sure whether the request was completely submitted or not.
So he asks Adam to start with a new form.The agent offers to help to create and resubmit the form, but is a little rusty on the procedure and field-level details. He consults with his supervisor and eventually gets a new cheque book request submitted by Adam.The agent can see through his "360 degree view screen" that the customer is eligible for the new auto-loan campaign launched by the bank but he's already way over target time for the call. He just asks "Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
Adam replies "no thanks, good bye!" and hangs up. Adam opens up an automobile website to search for a new car as he has wanted to change his car for weeks now.A few days later, Adam receives two cheque books from the bank instead of one. He looks at his online account statement from the website and notices he has been charged for two new cheque books.Adam thinks of picking up the phone again and calling the bank's call center to register a complaint, but gives up the idea in a split second based on his previous experience.
By the conventional way of managing interactions, everything looks good here. From the perspective of "Customer Interaction", the picture is quite different.Doesn't look like a big deal? Think of this happening a thousand times over...
Interaction Management-a different ballgame
A customer is a living entity and holds a number of instruments and relationships with the bank. The bank normally has this information in back-end systems and uses it to define cubes under data warehouse projects to create and modify its products. What this information is not used for, is to interact in real-time with the customers. If an agent knows that the customer just had a bad experience at an ATM, s/he would never try to sell a solution by making a call.
• If the customer holds a multi-million dollar account with the bank, the bank might not send out a reminder for a 100 dollar outstanding on a credit card.
The Operational Data Store has to be used to identify the customer behaviour, relationships, actions, complaints, and requests at one time from all channels-thus, providing the capability to address the customers with a human touch- leaving them with a 'wow' effect: "my bank understands me as a person and not a number!"
How to? Intent, of both customer and company, is the driving force of customer dynamics. To adequately gauge customer intent, interactions must be captured across all contact channels, in a way that enables them to be correlated, further analysed, and readily retrieved.
Comprehensive analysis of intent reveals insight that may not be apparent when looking at individual interactions. What appears to be a successful outcome-a customer getting the right answer to a question-may have been preceded by failures to get that information through self-service or other contact channels. Or that outcome may have addressed the surface need, but missed opportunities to sell additional products or services. This is a snapshot of an organisation correctly positioned in terms of its technology and framework to capture and process data that can do wonders for its business objectives.As you can see, there has to be a robust and intelligent middleware sitting at the core. The front-end channels and the back-end systems are connected to this middleware. Any customer request, complaint, or transaction originating from any channel must pass through the middleware before it reaches a core system.Data pertaining to how a transaction or customer request was handled, responded to, and eventually processed is also captured.This concept of multi-channel integration is, of course, not new; but what banks should achieve out of it is to process this data through a systematic approach to be able to comprehend exactly what's going on in all those transactions and interactions, to see patterns in the chaos, to glean insights, to understand what to do, and how to act to take charge of it all.This means, understanding what customers look for and why they act a certain way. Studying how interactions unfold shows ways to streamlining operations.
-- What's the fastest, most efficient way to handle those myriad everyday issues?
-- Do we have the right channels working at the right places and time?
-- Are they performing as expected? A crucial insight is whether the intent of the business to operate efficiently gets in the way of responding effectively to customer intent. This level of understanding leads to actions that make sure routine requests are handled super efficiently so that resources can focus on the more complex ones-improving the bottom-line while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction.Armed with a better understanding of customers and what's happening across all touch points, a bank can devise innovative ways to deliver an experience above and beyond the competition.
-- What would customers consider 'remarkable'?
-- What are they complaining about?
-- What do we do that irritates them?
-- What are they saying about the competition? Actions driven by these types of insights aim at turning customer satisfaction into customer loyalty!
Waqas has over thirteen years of experience in product development for the financial sector. He has lead, designed, and implemented several enterprise projects in Asian, Middle Eastern, and European markets. Waqas is a pioneer in establishing automation trends and practices in emerging markets in the areas of CRM, Wealth Management, and Transaction Processing. Currently, Waqas heads Core Products and Services at Avanza Solutions (ME).
As published in Techronicle, March 2011
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