How We Helped Our Client Improve Back-End Operations with Digital Transformation
In recent years, the financial services industry has invested in more ways to offer customers faster and more convenient online services. The shift from traditional to digital banking means providing a better customer experience, web-based services with back-office operations, and a high level of process automation.
Our client, a large regional bank, lacked a competitive customer experience and efficient back-office processing of new accounts, and was losing business because of it.
The client felt it was time to undergo an omni-channel digital transformation approach to:
- Improve the user experience of their online services
- Reduce the abandonment rate of customers opening an account
- Automate processing to shorten the time it takes to open and fund an account
Enter Centric: An Approach That Blends Front-End and Back-End to Improve Customer Experience
In order to stay competitive, our client knew they needed a partner. They chose Centric Consulting’s Cleveland office to support their Operational Excellence needs and redesign their new account opening digital platform across multiple channels.
We worked with the bank to find the right set of technologies that could integrate well with its operations across its product channels, and provide an exceptional account opening experience.
First, we designed a Proof of Concept (POC) using a combination of Customer Experience and Business Process Management (BPM) platforms to:
- Develop the cross-team architecture design.
- Ensure system integration, validate platform sizing.
- Provide high-confidence estimates to move forward with the full transformation project.
Over the course of the transformation initiative, we were responsible for designing, managing, developing, and testing each of the multiple releases of the account opening solution.
We implemented the multi-year, full transformation solution using a modified agile approach. This helped us to develop the front-end user interaction and integrate it with the company’s back-office processing and workflow tools.
The Results: A Better Customer Experience
We delivered a successful POC to validate the client’s technology selections ahead of schedule and under budget. Our team also helped the client understand the risks and gaps that would need to be addressed, and ultimately provided the client the confidence to embark on the digital transformation.
With our help, the client achieved:
- A solution implementation that improved the overall customer experience by providing the client with a much simpler and interactive interface over web, mobile, and tablet. This lead to a 36 percent reduction in the number of abandoned applications.
- A more efficient application processing system with user-friendly interfaces, streamlined processes and automation for back office operations. The new process was able to reduce operational costs significantly.
- A redesign of the client’s digital account opening process and platform that led to a significant decrease in abandonment rates and an overall increase in account openings via digital channels.
The bank’s management now has greater access to application and customer metrics and reporting dashboards to facilitate continuous improvement of the user experience and supporting back-office processing.
Process and UX designs are in place for subsequent releases that will extend the online product offerings to include credit cards and loans, capabilities such as cross-sell tools, instant pre-qualification, instant decision, and seamless device and channel switching.