DIGITAL BANKING Tips - Tip 18: Contact Centers and Digital Banking

Most useful insights, Tolga, very nice. It is quite interesting, how the role and functionality of something that has been in existence for quite a while can change quite significantly when Digitalisation happens. In my case, the Contact Center now actually is my bank. This is, as earlier this year I switched my banking from a regular prime real estate based in-person service to the same banks virtual bank. The benefit is, that I now can interact, commit to agreements, sign documents as so on, all digitally and virtually. Recently, I had an interesting encouter with the Chairman of the Board of a major bank. The gentleman is very respected in the banking industry and for sure knows very well what has worked before. But when we talked about Digitalisation, it very quickly became obvious that he was completely out of his depth. His vision of digitalisation was that it is all about changing the internal processes and adding some digital interfaces. When I pointed out there being a significant difference between a bank digitalising a service and customers actually using it, his firm belief was that it is all the same. Well, that's why 70% of the product launches globally do fail. In a recent blog I came across, the author quite nicely made the point, that a common sin companies commit when digitalising their offering is, that the value proposition is designed based on the company's internal setup. That is the case, because this is how the company works. With this inward focussed go-to-market approach they unfortunately forget, that their customers neither are, nor should they be, interested in how their service provider is set up internally. What these folks called customers are however typically looking for is a convenient and cost efficient way to have their needs covered. As simple as that. If a company designs its offering based on what it can do with its organisational setup, instead of delivering to their customers needs, the likeability is quite high they will fail quote dramatically.

Miika such a wonderful and critical comment you wrote here, thank you. It is a sad truth that there has been some narrow interpretation of digitalization taking place by most respected people and companies. Co-product development with customers is never as easy as now, also customer feedbacks are at everywhere. But still some institutions see DIGITAL as a project or a limited tool, rather than as a radical change in the balance between the customer and the provider.