Modern financial services organisations need technology to help them stimulate business growth, yet for many it’s their current systems that are holding them back.
Inflexible legacy applications, often with masses of infrastructure, ‘worked around’ by email and Excel, are no longer a viable option for those looking to scale their business. This is why many businesses are moving to modern cloud solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. However, organisations may have some reservations about making the move, so we’ve listed 3 ways modern Customer Engagement platforms can help facilitate business growth and enable you to scale your business seamlessly.
- Promote innovation, doesn’t stifle it
Rapidly changing markets and increasing competition mean that financial services organisations need to be flexible, agile and innovative to attract and retain customers.
Technology solutions that cannot keep pace with the needs of the business quickly make good ideas a challenge to implement or push them in to ‘cottage industries’ using spreadsheets that introduce risk and cannot scale.
By quickly and easily allowing organisations to capture new data points, implement new workflows and define new business rules and processes within a flexible framework, modern solutions can support innovation rather than stifling it.
By integrating with collaboration tools and putting more power into the hands of end users, the latest cloud platforms can actually be the catalyst to promote new areas of innovation and improvement that were not imaginable before.
Examples:
- Integration of Microsoft Teams and opportunity deal teams / customer cases – allowing focused, traceable and instant collaboration across multiple business areas on key opportunities and client issues
- Platform enablement of easy-to-configure customer portal capability led to new ideas for self-service, document validation at the point of submission and provision of customer accessible reporting
- ‘App in a day’ training for IT and business colleagues has led to ideas for improvement that had not even been considered possible, such as the rapid implementation of digital customer surveys and the implementation of customer onboarding data capture in a simple mobile app
- Enable AI automation & process efficiency
When it comes to the operational and sales teams and processes within a financial services business, systems are often seen as tools that slow things down or are onerous for end users, taking time away from selling or delivering for customers.
The automation capabilities of cloud-based platforms have come on leaps and bounds, from the ease of setting up automation of repetitive tasks – like customer onboarding or in-life checklists to full-blown Robotic Process Automation that can manage tasks completely.
More recent innovations within platforms are providing AI ‘co-pilots’ which provide support and suggestions that are becoming increasingly valuable in improving efficiency across the board, while keeping key decisions and process in the hands of your team.
All of these things combine to give your team more available time to put towards real value-add activities – selling more, supporting customers or coming up with more ideas to stimulate business growth.
Examples:
- An Excel sheet with more than 10 tabs and multiple macro’s that was supporting a global commercial calculation and approval process and systemised it into a mobile-enabled, secure and scalable solution that has seen approvals take hours rather than days, improved consistency and reduced risk of errors by more than 80%.
- A 90% reduction in case checking and error identification processes where validation and automation has been introduced within the customer submission journey also supporting 75% reduction in case administration time and a four-fold increase in the number of cases a team member is able to progress in a month.
- Manual, paper-based contract printing and signing process replaced with digital signatures and automated version control, saving £100,000+ in paper, printing and postage and the thousands of trees per annum.
- Embed compliance and reduce risk
We all know that within financial services, compliance is king – we cannot for a second afford to take shortcuts when it comes to following the rules and doing what is right for our customers.
However, too often, compliance processes are manual, laborious and slow down key customer facing processes – but it needn’t be that way.
By embedding compliance checks and processes within your Customer Engagement platform, you can make compliance easier for customers and staff, while at the same time and reduce risk of non-compliance by enforcing data capture and approvals through the process.
But how does that stimulate business growth? To some extent, it is about making more time available for value-added activities, but also it helps to drive behaviours that will see your organisation succeed while working within compliance frameworks and reduce the time and effort required to get new staff up to speed with what is needed.
Examples:
- Manual in-life checklist process replaced with automated task generation – the processes is now easier to follow with manual effort reduced more than 80% and the risk of missing key compliance deadlines reduced almost to zero.
- Automated compliance Case review based on case information and system-implemented random selection – saw a 75% reduction in case administration time and manual errors reduced by more than 90%
- Automation of contract and terms document generation removing a manual process but also eradicating the potential for human error generating these complex but essential customer facing documents
Conclusion
If your organisation is struggling to keep pace with the rate of innovation and change in the market, and you suspect that one cause is outdated customer and sales systems, it might be time to consider whether Microsoft’s suit of Customer Engagement tools could help.
