Building Better Customer Relationships with Intelligent Automation

In fact, Accenture research on UK commercial banks from 2019 tells us that only 26% of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) would give up their Relationship Managers for a digital-only offering – even if it were offered at a cheaper price.

Relationship management is not going to go out of fashion any time soon. But it is changing.

Empowering your front-line staff to succeed and improve wallet share should be a critical objective for any end-to-end digital transformation strategy.

The key is to understand where to automate and how to free up their time to focus on value-adding, customer services that differentiates them from the competition. After all, more than half of all Relationship Managers spend up to 72 days per year per person just onboarding customers.

Bridging the Customer Experience Gap

Siloed operational models are creating internal efficiencies and inflating costs. By integrating customer lifecycle and customer relationship management processes and systems, your financial services firm can benefit from greater internal operational efficiencies and tighter end-to-end customer journey orchestration that translates directly into better external customer experiences. Here’s where to start:

1. Optimize the Customer Data Journey

Customer experience is built on data. The easy flow of that data to relevant stakeholders and systems will provide insights that make the customer journey more engaging, beneficial, and seamless.

For customer-facing teams to provide the best onboarding experience possible, it’s critical for them to have a holistic view of customers’ activities across different channels and across the organization. Here’s how:

• Integrate CRM and CLM systems and processes so that customer information flows easily from sales teams to internal functions. This includes integrating all other data repositories within your firm that hold pertinent customer information to create a 360° view of the customer.

• Centralize customer data and documentation for re-use, enabling staff to utilize these insights for upsell/cross-sell opportunities and to meet new regulatory obligations

• Leverage API integrations for a better customer experience. By integrating with external data providers, such as World Check One, RDC and Bureau van Dijk, your organization can save the time and inconvenience involved in asking customers to repeatedly submit information. Additional value-added services, including integrated customer outreach, digital ID&V, and eSignatures, can help automate the capture and verification of identity information and documentation.

• Extract meaningful information locked away in documents that can be added to customer risk profile by deploying OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and NLP (Natural Language Processing).

2. Streamline KYC Onboarding

By connecting customer-facing and internal systems, your financial institution can further deploy a distributed compliance model to automate customer due diligence processes and relieve the KYC compliance burden. This means that the onus of compliance and data collection is shared fairly across the organization.

With this integrated model, front-line staff can complete initial customer due diligence tasks that do not require specialist knowledge within their CRM experience. This real-time information is then fed directly back to compliance teams, streamlining the decision-making process, and speeding up onboarding times.

Utilizing your customer-facing sales team as the first line of defence in regulatory compliance can enable faster, centralized onboarding, deliver greater transparency and, ultimately, improve your end-customer experience.

3. Deliver Enterprise-Wide Process Visibility

Perhaps the best part of integrating CRM and CLM solutions is the increased transparency across the end-to-end customer journey and the visibility into each customer case.

By building integration on an API-rich framework that promotes straight through processing, financial firms can alleviate pressure from employees and manage risk by exception.

In this way, every customer onboarding case can be digitally and seamlessly directed unimpeded through all internal approval processes across onboarding operations (from account origination, compliance, legal to account opening).

Conclusion

By integrating CRM and CLM solutions and connecting operational functions, your financial organization can abolish the siloes that exist around functional data and systems.

Doing so will allow your organization to improve transparency across the customer journey and visibility into individual customer cases, enabling customer-facing teams to fully manage and monitor every onboarding case with complete oversight from compliance.

In this way, the customer’s end-to-end lifetime journey – from initial prospecting, onboarding, ongoing due diligence, and product/service cross-selling and upselling as their needs evolve – can be tightly orchestrated across every channel to deliver maximum value across every reduced touchpoint.

Want to learn more about how you can digitalize KYC and onboarding operations for a faster, more seamless customer experience? Download the full report.