5 stage Digital Maturity to improve Customer On-boarding

New account opening and subsequent customer on-boarding process is going through seismic shift due to change in customer's behaviour and rapid technology adoption. Customers are entering into anytime- anywhere service paradigm, where they expect Banks to know about them and provide transparent, real-time interactive services. Banks also need to be very sensitive to the cost of operation and time to market, to stay ahead of the competition. Banks also should  be aware of the rapid rise of alternate banking models (P2P lending, Crowd sourcing, eBanking, Digital Wallets like Apple pay, crypto currency models) and enforce continuous innovation culture across Business, Operations and IT to stay in business. 

Following are the  potential areas of focus, when banks start to embark upon a journey to improve customer on-boarding:-

Digital Maturity stage -1: E2E transaction capability in each channel

key challenges:-

• Inability to attract customer traffic and attention in each channels
• High digital sales abandonment in products like commercial lending, cards due to inconsistent and immature process
• High customer on-boarding time & cost.

Focus area to improve maturity:-

• Continuous Monitoring and improvement of marketing and sales effort in each channel etc
• Build capabilities in each channel to engagement customer i.e. Communities, Chats, social, Call Center, IVR, Mobile, web, Social etc
• Simplification of Business Process & IT landscape.

Market leaders initiatives:-

• Banks across the globe are embarking upon Simplifications initiatives to reduce number of applications, process and Infrastructure.

Digital Maturity stage -2: Consistent Cx across all channels

key challenges:-

• Variable Customer Experience across channels due to lack of process standards
• High customer on-boarding time and cost due to lack of IT Standardization.

Focus areas to improve maturity:-

• Standardization of Back Office soiled process - KYC, AML, Payments reconciliation, error handling etc in  each channel using products like Pega, IBM BPM etc
• Build an Unified Content Management (Creation, organization and publishing) capability with implementation of products like ADOBE, IBM, SDL, SiteCore etc
• Introduce Design and development standards i.e. Ux (HTML5, CSS3, Angular JS, PhoneGap, JQuery etc); Business process modelling, & business rules (BPMN, BPEL, IFW, DMN etc) and application, data architectures (BIAN, IFX etc), security (mobile and CLOUD security)
• Introduce right SOA and API management (i.e. WSO2, Layer7, MuleSoft, IBM, TIBCO etc) to improve reusable assets and augment B2B and B2C transaction capabilities, also fuel innovation through App store.

Market leaders initiatives:-

• Banks across the globe are embarking upon Global standards initiatives to standardize process and IT services.

Digital Maturity stage -3: Multi-Channel Cx - ability to complete a transaction using multiple channels

key challenges:-

• Lack of customer centric user experience design enablement
• Lack of mobile banking capabilities
• High customer On-boarding time & cost due to lack of Infra and IT Agility & automation.

Focus areas to improve maturity:-

• Change design philosophy to enable persona user experience management
• Enable process standardization across channels
• Creating Digital innovation labs to fuel rapid prototyping and innovation
• Introduce capabilities like Payments, transaction history, query management, approval, digital wallet using Mobile channel
• Enable Infra and IT agility and automation through rapid environment provisioning using CLOUD and virtualization (CLOUDFundry, IBMBlueMix etc); Lack of automation in SDLC - continuous integration (Jenkins, Hudson etc); build (Maven); coding standards (sonar); SCM (SVN); Unit testing tools (Mokito); ALM (IBM Rational etc); deploy (Udepoy); automated integration testing (LISA) etc 
• Manage IT vendor's SLA and risk to align timely fix and releases.

Market leaders initiatives:-

• Banks across the globe are embarking upon agile & automated infrastructure and development process through rapid adoption of CLOUD and DevOps and model driven testing.

Digital Maturity stage -4: Personalized customer lifecycle management through single customer view, real time decision making and next best action

key challenges:-

• Lack of Cross-channel measurement
• Lack of Cross-channel Campaign Management to improve conversion
• Cross channel analytics & targeting for greater customer experience and conversion
• Anytime-Anywhere on-boarding enabled by customer centric Business process management.

Focus areas to improve maturity:-

• build unified analytic capabilities across social, mobile and web channels using products like Adobe, IBM, Attensity, Brandwatch etc
• Build Business activity monitoring and Complex event processing using IBM, Oracle, TIBCO products
• Build a multichannel Campaign management capability using Adobe, IBM, SDL etc
• Build a single customer view using standard CRM solutions;
• Enable real time marketing and sales through next best actions using Big data, BI, analytics platforms (i.e. Hadoop, Cassandra, Sparks, Splunk, IBM, TIBCO etc).
• Customer centric process automation & e-commerce capabilities using mobile, social and Web Channels using products like Adobe, IBM, Kony, Pega, SAP etc.

Market leaders initiatives:-

• Banks across the globe are incubating small scale pilots through sales and marketing channel improvement initiaitves using Big data, analytics initiatives.

Digital Maturity stage -5: Personalized brand experience through optimization of channel experience to reflect the brand promise and cultivate influencers

key challenges:-

• Lack of Cross-Channel Optimization to increase 1-2-1 personalization and to improve conversion
• Lack of Marketing optimization to increase revenue realization
• Advocacy & Influence management to improve brand loyalty and value.

Focus areas to improve maturity:-

• Provide optimization capabilities using A/B testing, Multivariate testing with products like Adobe, IBM etc
• Marketing & Media attribution mix modelling to achieve desired revenues and profitability
• Detailed segmentation to identify the brand champions and advocates using products like IBM, Adobe etc.

Market leaders initiatives:-

• Banks will start to experiment using in-memory computing, predictive analytics and cognitive intelligence initiatives to improve advanced Sales and marketing initiatives.

Note: Banks can initiate the initiatives in one go. also the tools recommended are indicative in nature.