Guest blog by Patricia Moore, Client Executive Lead at DXC, Financial Services

Customer needs are rapidly changing. To meet these needs, banks and building societies must make customer experience the starting point for all physical and digital interactions. In this blog, Patricia Moore - Client Executive Lead for financial services at DXC provides a unique perspective into why it is important to serve banks and building societies for a digital world and why ‘one size does not fit all’.

It goes without saying that customers are the life blood of all organisations and that approach can apply both internally within a company (i.e., the employees are loyal ‘customers’ to the brand whom they work for), and externally (customers who pay for your products and services).

Keeping and attracting customers is key and banks seem to have so many ways to do so using digital channels enabling greater customer satisfaction but also increasing the engagement that the banks and building societies have with more products and services.  

A common mantra is that a happy customer is a loyal customer, a repeat customer, and ultimately, a brand ambassador. Therefore, creating the digital world that banks and building societies service them with is critical.

How can banks and building societies do this?

There are so many ways and as I have said in my previous discussions, “one size does not fit all” because people prefer and are aligned to different experiences. For example, some prefer a low-level contact and to manage everything themselves and therefore appreciate self-service environments – the pinnacle of digital capabilities – using the internet, mobile, and data-driven insights to interact how they wish to manage their finances.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are those that are more dependent on human contact and dialogue, visiting the branch, using the call centres, and having face-to-face meetings.

To cover for this wide spectrum of engagements between digital and physical interactions is costly. It is important therefore, that the customer can move through all methods of contact seamlessly to suit their immediate needs.  

A robust digital strategy is required, one which prioritises areas that need immediate attention to focus on and start the digital journey and being realistic on timescales and complexity that needs to be undertaken. From experience, many banks and building societies would say that a good starting point is with data; bringing together the customer data to create a single view of the customer (SCV) and by developing an integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. This can enable banks and building societies to understand the customer base, the key priorities, and the way in which they wish to be served. Building on top of this, the environment to really serve these customers, via an omni-channel engagement, from mobile to rejuvenation of the branches and as important designing products that fit that customer base.

As a company grows, the benefits of digital engagement will be seen, and this will extend beyond the happy customers and employees, to things like the benefits of revenue growth, better product development, brand awareness and respect, and market penetration and growth.

It is not an easy journey for yourselves and customers but certainly a necessary and valuable engagement – life is a Journey not a destination – and the planning and first step are perhaps the most important.

Understanding customers

Many areas of technology in financial services are reaching such a critical mass and progressively this convergence is driving greater and more rapid impact in this industry. Big data and cloud are key elements due to the rapidly changing customer behaviours escalated by the explosion of access to information.

The rate of growth in new trends that are building on each other is significant, and interfaces that were easy to use are becoming more intuitive. Customer engagement is crucial, and therefore having a customer-centric perspective in digital banking is important.

What does this all mean?

• The digital financial services landscape is constantly evolving
• The emergence of new trends and disruption is increasing
• Banks and building societies that don’t evolve risk falling behind
• Financial services need to engage with the changing landscape and influence stakeholders to recognize the impact
   

About DXC

DXC designs, develops, and implements hundreds of custom financial services solutions and software applications using Microsoft technologies across Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) for Customer Services and Power Platform for banks and building societies, at scale.

Working with more than 350 Banking and Capital Markets clients worldwide, including over 60 financial services companies in the UK alone, DXC’s Connected Bank solution offers an off-the-shelf, configurable solution built on D365 for Customer Services. This enables a bank or building society to overhaul the entire technology infrastructure and leverage the latest technology on the market. The foundation of our approach is Azure.