Customer Experience Transformation: Improving Customer Retention With Business Process Management (BPM)

According to recent studies, improving the customer experience has become both a significant trend and a strategic objective for financial institutions. Unfortunately, many of them talk about making improvements without making the investments that reduce friction.

The study above also found that organizations with the best customer experience see a higher share of deposits and have customers who are nearly twice as likely to refer new customers. They’re twice as likely to try new products from their bank.  

Our client, a regional banking institution, knew it needed to make a change for these reasons and more. While it maintains multiple assets, from commercial lending to personal checking to investment management, it was having difficulty attracting and retaining customers. As such, leaders knew they needed to build the right customer experience and interactions, but they didn’t know how.

Enter Centric: Where Process Meets Customer Experience

The client worked with Centric Consulting’s Cleveland team because of our Operational Excellence expertise to assist with its customer experience transformation.  

Even with a digital presence, customers weren’t engaged — around 80 percent of loan and deposit account applicants were dropping off before completing their requests. 

To help resolve these issues, the company wanted to evolve and provide an omnichannel experience, and it tried to do so by placing applications online. However, its online loan applications asked upward of fifty questions, and approval times could be up to two weeks. Additionally, if a customer reported a problem with his or her application, there was no way for a customer service representative to look it up. 

Our client needed to do more than place applications online — it also needed to ensure its products were optimized for the digital experience and matched its other customer touchpoints to those experiences. Especially considering that 71 percent of consumers desire a consistent experience between channels, but only 29 percent actually get it.  

It was clear the company needed to transform its processes to enhance the customer experience both online and off. This understanding meant an assessment was needed to get started, which would ultimately result in the development of a solution to streamline customer interaction. 

A Business Process Management Solution to Transform the Customer Experience

We recognized our business process management (BPM) solutions would benefit this client most. If its leaders were going to transform the customer experience, they needed end-to-end process visibility and the convergence of process, people and technology to make a true impact.  

We took three primary steps to help the client create a solution that would both rework the online experience and restructure its internal teams’ workloads for better overall customer experiences: 

• We partnered with a marketing firm to determine what problems existed from the customer point-of-view. 
• We determined what was needed to redesign the application process to optimize the user experience.  
• We created a Proof of Concept using software the client already owned but hadn’t yet integrated into all processes, including IBM BPM and Adobe Experience Manager.

The Results: A Customer Experience Transformation That Improves How Everyone Works

Once the initial phase of work was in place, we were able to transform the company’s organizational structure. It created better, more balanced workloads in the call centers, and it made its overall customer experience more efficient by reducing the time needed to respond to queries.  

Here are a few more results we achieved together with our regional bank client: 

• We reduced the number of required customer questions on all applications, some by as much as 60 percent. Because the length of the applications is now shorter, more applicants are completing their requests. 
• We created a seamless automated solution moving from 0 percent automation to providing 67 percent of customers a fully automated end-to-end experience, freeing up more time for employees to build customer relationships. 
• We reduced the time to complete opening a deposit account from 5 days to 5 minutes, a 99.9 percent improvement. What once required multiple channel touchpoints is now entirely digital, delivering better user experiences and higher completion rates.  

• We exceeded the estimations in the business case by improving conversion rates by 28 percent and accounts opened by over 49 percent. In other words, more new leads are completing applications and converting to customers than initially expected. 

Transforming your organization to meet modern expectations is about more than meeting your customers online. By considering the whole user experience and adapting its core processes to address customer needs and desires, our financial services client was able to achieve a better relationship with its customers overall.  

In our ebook, Rethinking Business Transformation: Build Business Agility Throughout Your Organization To Keep Pace With Rapid Change, Greg Klem states, “high-performing processes enable operational excellence, including improved scalability, flexibility, agility, productivity, quality and customer satisfaction.” By recognizing a need to transform and the importance of improving the customer experience, our client took action and has achieved the value of those high performing processes Greg mentions.