INTEGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE A CHALLENGE FOR FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Many financial institutions struggle to integrate customer-facing applications. Program administration often resides in separate business units with little synchronization between them. Coordinated customer experience (CX) is difficult to achieve when the applications are running under separate software and accessing independent databases.
 
This situation came about as financial institutions (FI’s) scurried to meet rapid implementation targets demanded by top management and FI customers. To respond, information technology groups, and sometimes business units themselves, deployed standalone solutions that met marketplace requirements but resulted in a convoluted collection of uncoordinated systems.
 
As mobile communications became must-have’s in the FI marketplace, business units within FI’s contracted with outside development firms specializing in mobile apps. Time to market was the driving motivation. Now, application disconnections contribute to inconsistent branding images and customer experiences.
 
Making matters worse, some legacy FI systems are increasingly difficult to maintain. When regulatory changes or competitive pressures mandate new features, IT must find resources with the knowledge necessary to code and test the modifications. Given the maintenance headaches, IT might prefer to re-write the old code modules in a modern language, but there’s never enough time or budget. Patches and workarounds proliferate.

A CX Overhaul
FI’s need is a comprehensive overhaul that consolidates all the functionality in a single customer communications system. In many financial services organizations, customer communication frameworks can barely handle the communications challenges of today. Original programmers did not build dynamic on-statement messaging and channel preference, for example, into legacy document applications still generating transactional documents. Future communication technology developments are likely to present an even greater management issue for these aging computer programs.
 
A new comprehensive system for customer communications can generate plenty of benefits for FI’s. Unburdened by old technology, organizations can concentrate on what they want to communicate to customers instead of worrying about how to do it. Redesigned communications composed with modern software can allow FI’s to include interactive charts, add color, or enhance documents with details that improve comprehension and reduce call center traffic. Marketing teams can target their messages, test multiple versions, track results, and respond to rapidly changing conditions without waiting weeks for their turn on the IT priority list. New customer communication systems can deliver documents via the customer’s mobile device or other channels while maintaining consistent branding and functionality. Customers can start a process in one channel and finish in another while navigating within a contiguous environment.

Customers Demand More
Consumers expect companies to know their interests and anticipate their needs. Companies like Amazon and Netflix communicate with them on a personal level and they expect similar treatment from the companies that handle personal details like their finances. Financial institutions must step up their efforts in this area to gain customer loyalty.
 
Most FI’s, particularly small to medium size organizations, realize creating a modern, omni-channel customer communications system from scratch is a huge undertaking. They don’t have the internal IT resources to build, test, and integrate all the components. Outsourcing their customer-facing communications to a partner with brandable solutions already in place is often the only path that yields positive results within a reasonable timeframe.
 
Lanvera is a world-class provider of end-to-end outsourcing solutions for transactional and business-critical communications. We couple cutting edge technology solutions with industry expertise to solve the complex business challenges facing customer-critical document delivery. Lanvera lets clients provide data in any format while delivering documents via any channel, including print, mobile, web and ePresentment.
 
Our consultative approach, ongoing technological investments, and custom solutions provides FI clients with answers that satisfy their business challenges. We have been specializing in creating customized solutions for the creation and delivery of business-critical data on any digital platform and print for over 30 years.