While most banks have made customer-centricity one of their highest priorities, they still seek new competitive advantages in response to changes in customer trust, demographics, and demands as well as profit margins reduced by higher capital requirements, compliance costs, and lower fee income. As customers demand real-time, multichannel, and mobile transactions, it has become clear that customer-centricity requires changes in business and operating models to rebuild margins and maintain customer loyalty. To attract everyday customers, banks need real-time processes that are accessible via all channels (including mobile and tablet devices) to deliver relevant up-to-the minute analysis whenever they are needed.
Unified communications strategies seek to bring client’s telecommunication, networking and office technology requirements in-line with business processes – with the goal of optimizing staff productivity by enabling collaboration seamlessly and efficiently after their organizational re-alignment along BU lines, and across geo lines.
Creating a Positive Unified Communications User Experience
Connecting to the right people at the right time can have a significant impact on productivity, customer relationships, and especially your organization’s bottom line. As business communications grow more complex—with employees using diverse communication devices, applications, and modalities—making the right connections can become increasingly challenging.
The failure to establish right connections leads to communication latency, increasing the amount of time required to make and execute critical business decisions.
Business Process inefficiency is often heightened by the geographically dispersed nature of Client’s business units. Face-to-face meetings can be prohibitively expensive. Yet, collaboration is essential to complete work projects. Traditional standalone data, telephony, and video solutions may not be effective in enabling the fast response and coordination necessary to reduce communication latency. Most of these solutions lack interoperability and add to system administration burdens.
To address these issues, organizations are turning to UC&C model, which brings together today’s disparate methods of communications into a set of multimodal capabilities that are highly aware of one another. By adopting UC&C, it will be easier for you to reach people and to let others know how to reach you. UC&C uses voice, email, instant messaging (IM), audio conferencing, and video conferencing, in combination with presence awareness to immediately locate and contact individuals. UC&C can also be integrated with social media to broaden the context of and enrich enterprise communications.
To achieve breakthrough results, it’s important to think about communications in a new way. The tools are important, but the tools themselves are not ‘unified communications.” The key is to organize these tools to support communications requirements within a business enterprise’s operations – the workflows and processes that create revenues and profits or otherwise help accomplish an organization’s goals.
By providing a unique interface that can process both voice and digital data, unified communications solution improves efficiency for users and businesses and this is where the holistic unified experiential approach is drawn.
There has been a critical shift of minds in banking industry CEOs from 2014, where the concentration was on cost take-out to 2015, where the concentration is on customer experiences. Gartner 2015 data survey does indicate financial services CEOs are searching for ways in which their firms can be more innovative, agile and scalable (for example, in terms of product, service delivery and organizational structure).
Key proposition towards positive customer experiences emphasizes upon below three tactical actions for new digital banking initiatives:
1. Social Channel Integration for Banking Transactions: Today digital banks are using unified communications to deliver better customer services through social engagements such as facebook and twitter for both marketing/branding & user response. Video conferening and telepresence let banking specialists (mortgage banking, commercial banking) maximising value by clients regardless of their locations.
2. API Based Banking Economy: The application programming interface (API) economy is based around four building blocks: social, mobile, analytics and cloud.. For example, buyers and sellers could be connected via an exchange, where all parts of the value chain come from separate parties and are linked via APIs to facilitate an end-to-end transaction.
3. Hybrid Model of UC Implementations: The hybrid solution allows the enterprise to maximize those features that are mandatory for the entire organization, while using cloud based features only for those in the organization who need them. The enterprise can always move functions from the cloud to a premises-based system as the cloud costs exceed the cost of on-site implementation.
How service providers can help:
Provide organizations with customized, highly intuitive, and end-to-end collaboration solutions that run over existing IP networks and desktop applications. UC&C solution integration with voice, video, and web-conferencing capabilities provide an edge—giving remote meetings a natural and effective face-to-face quality. This lets you incorporate media-rich interactions into a broad range of communication scenarios. Leveraging cutting-edge web-conferencing technology, work closely with your clients to understand:
– Function and usability you want from the solution
– Security level your organization requires
– Expected use to design the appropriate capacity and capability
