The banking industry has undergone a significant shift in the last decade or so. Stiff competition, an evolving banking landscape, changing customer preferences and more recently the health pandemic have all led to a shift in how banks are managing the customer experience. Technology is at the crux of how companies around the world are managing client expectations.
Customer experience technology has reached to a different level that can make or break companies. For millions of well-informed consumers in the MENA region, the entire banking experience is being completely re-imagined. Irrespective of the geography, customers are increasingly looking at banks to create an experience that is cognizant of their requirements. Gone are the days of waiting in line to speak to the bank manager, deposit a cheque or open a savings account.
Right across the region, banks are being transformed beyond recognition thanks to radically changing customer expectations and a digital economy that puts the customer in the driving seat. Customers that have embraced the vast opportunities of the digital economy, a whole new world of collaborative non-banking experiences has been unlocked – across multiple channels, places and touchpoints.
Driving much of the customer experience revolution are partnerships between banking and non-banking organisations. These partnerships enable banks to accelerate participation in e-commerce and the digital economy – and to create the kind of experiences that today’s customers expect.
The interactive telling machine
For many banks, the branch has evolved around the needs of the customer by offering a range of self-service technologies such as interactive telling machines (ITMs) in a one-stop digital environment: a fully functioning branch experience that is digitally enabled. These cross-platform services also show how banks are no longer restricted by only financial services in bricks and mortar branches.
For the customers of traditional banks, the experience is enriched through multiple platforms, channels and touchpoints, with some offering a blend of call centres, social channels, interactive telling machines (ITMs), public forums, chatbots and pure-digital branches.
Digital adoption and an omni-channel approach
For banks, digital adoption is a balancing act because even though a physical presence is still necessary for many customers, the direction of travel is irrefutable. Recent research and analysis from the consulting firm Arthur. D. Little suggests that 89 percent of GCC banking customers are more likely to choose digital banking over branch banking. This preference is being driven not only by the inherent convenience and speed of digital banking but by the provision of exceptionally personalised services.
Thanks to big data and artificial intelligence (AI), banks now have the ability to create a much clearer, more nuanced, and ultimately more relevant picture of what customers need. By offering an omni-channel customer experience, banks can provide the same services and products to customers regardless of the platform or channel.
These technologies also allow banks to rapidly identify gaps in the market and introduce solutions even faster than before. Crucially, these technologies have opened the door to banking-as-a-service (BaaS) – a paradigm shift in what banks actually do and why they exist.
Banking-as-a-Service
By investing in and collaborating with innovators across the digital economy (not just the fintech ecosystem), banks can now pull together a suite of highly personalised banking and non-banking products within a BaaS framework. This is an approach that allows banks to place every customer at the heart of their operations, to create a tailored experience and unleash personal success for each and every individual customer.
Through BaaS, services such as insurance solutions can be easily bolted on to the digital banking experience. While BaaS is still in its infancy for many banks and relatively new as an experience for customers, it is transformative in its ability to provide banks with vast new avenues for b2b revenue generation. Thanks to machine learning algorithms, the BaaS experience will offer customers a truly unique, tailored, timely and relevant suite of products and services.
Through partnerships across the digital economy, we are seeing innovations in customer experience, usher in a completely new era, where the customer is no longer a passive recipient of a narrow suite of off-the-rack financial products – because every product, every service and every customer experience is made-to-measure.
Providing a great customer experience is a continuous journey and banks can leverage disruptive technologies and tools to offer a seamless customer experience. They have a huge responsibility to leverage the potential of the digital economy to provide the breadth of services, products and tools that customers need in the context of today’s incredibly complex digital economy.
Now more than ever, it is time for us to recognise that a bank is no longer just a bank.
