In recent years, the way a customer engages with a financial service organisation has changed. Gone are the days you would receive all new business applications in an envelope with a cheque from the customer. As a consumer, when your circumstances change, you no longer need to write a letter to update your account details. You expect to be able to make updates on a Web site, smartphone or tablet. What has not changed is the expectation that your request is completed correctly and in an acceptable timeframe.
Since the inception of banking and insurance, there has been diversification in the market, and no more so than in the last 20 years. The growth into additional markets has been achieved by adding new products and/or geographies, and in many cases, has led to the addition of new IT systems to support the specific needs of the marketplace.
We all know it is more cost-effective to cross-sell than it is to acquire new customers. What was once a customer with one product managed on one system has now become a customer with multiple products managed on multiple systems. This creates a new challenge of what to do when the customer who has bought more than one product needs to make a change that affects all their policy or account holding.
As the organisation grows, the desire to up-sell or cross-sell increases, as well as the need to provide a consistent customer brand experience across the various product types. This consistent experience extends beyond the sales cycle and into the policy/account servicing cycle. This then becomes an opportunity for further sales or at the very least, an opportunity to retain the customer.
Customer experience challenge
For many financial services organisations, a business process is the primary manifestation of the customer experience. From a customer perspective, they may not interact with all parts of the process, but they certainly feel its effects, whether through decisions made or simply the completion of the process.
With the increasing desire to engage with the processes via the Web or mobile device, the amount of customer interaction is only ever increasing. The obvious operational benefit to the organisation for creating a self-service opportunity is in moving some of the cost of business back to the customer. To achieve this, changes to a process that is driven by the customer are likely to be required, including the need to consumerise all terminology, standardise the process, and create experiences aligned with meaningful customer life events.
Technology challenge
In order to support a call centre, various solutions have been put in place that aim to provide a single view of the customer, for example, their current address, policies/accounts they hold, and how much the policies are worth. What few of these solutions do is manage the consequence of the next part of the conversation - "I have got married", "I have got a new job", "I have moved house". These customer life and lifestyle events can affect all the policies/accounts the customer holds, and the consequence of the request needs to be managed through all parts of the business until the customer needs are met.
This is where the solutions that have been put together over the last 10 years tend to fall short. Being able to provide a single view of customer information so that a customer services staff member can answer the questions is a completely different problem from providing a solution that enables a customer to answer the questions themselves and make a change across all the policies.
In our multi-product world, I may have a savings account, car insurance and mortgage with the same financial services organisation. For a savings account, a request to move house is a relatively simple change, with an update being required to my address details for the account. For the car insurance policy, the consequence of the request is a little more complicated in that I will most likely have my premium re-quoted and adjusted to reflect either the additional or reduced risks of my new address. For the mortgage, the consequence of moving house is fundamental and will most likely result in a whole new application process and hopefully the retention of business.
How AWD10 can help tackle the challenge
The challenge that organisations must now face is how to provide transparency of a policy or account application directly to the customer, while recognising that some policies and accounts will go through different routes because of customer status, jurisdictional, contractual requirements or legacy technology.
Technology challenges stem from having different products being administered through different applications which have different requirements for data, data validation and data entry sequencing. This is a classic challenge that a business process management solution (BPM) such as AWD can help resolve more cost-effectively than consolidating all existing administration systems. AWD10 provides three components that can help facilitate resolving this challenge:
* Case/transaction hierarchy: both a case and a transaction can have process models independently associated with them, which in turn allows for the creation of child processes.
* Presentation flows: each presentation flow is designed as a self-contained unit of data capture with the required data being validated either through the built-in data dictionary, through visual design decisions, or by invoking external decision engines via a Web service.
* Service flows: it is through AWD's ability to invoke external decisioning applications in a service flow that helps businesses transition to customer event processes.
How bringing it all together helps the transition to customer-centric technology
Business process management systems are part of an overall solution in customer life cycle management. At DST, we provide software and services solutions that encompass the customer life cycle. We firmly believe that bringing together solutions from specialists in each space is both a more cost-effective mechanism for delivering customer life cycle management, but also starts to create a joined together proposition more quickly.
The case and transaction split, coupled with presentation and service flows, can be used to good effect in order to provide a mechanism for outwardly managing the customer experience while internally transitioning from product-centric to customer-centric thinking.
As soon as the customer makes a decision to notify a lifestyle event, a customer case will be created. The case will act as the orchestrator of the high level process that must be followed in order to complete the customer request. The focus of the process in the case is to help ensure:
1. All the required information is captured from the customer in the most effective way;
2. The consequence of the customer's request on all policies and accounts is identified, and transactions that will need to be initiated in order to fulfil the customer expectations are determined;
3. The downstream transactions are initiated and orchestrated;
4. Completion or status information from downstream transactions is obtained; and
5. Confirmations that all requests have been completed are sent to the customer.
Capturing all required customer data
It is important that as much information as necessary, but as little information as required is captured in one interaction with the customer. Presentation flows are designed to be self-contained, but can also be re-used in other presentation flows. This allows an organisation to design an interaction once and then re-use that interaction and the information captured through multiple product application forms.
Identifying the required transactions
Once all the customer application data has been captured, the case will then determine what processes need to be created in order to satisfy completion of the application. Each of the policies or accounts the customer has applied for is likely to result in a new transaction being created to manage that aspect of the customer's application or servicing request.
Initiate and orchestrate
Having determined which transactions are required to complete the application process, the parent case will initiate each of the transaction processes and pre-populate the transaction with the customer information captured via the case. Each of the transactions can then run independently, in their own life cycle. Whether the processes for individual transactions are automated, semi-automated or primarily manual, it then becomes a business-driven case for each individual product, geography or system. As the business profile changes, areas of increased automation can then be added by replacing manual tasks with AWD service flows. Irrespective of the level of automation on completion, the process will update the parent case to indicate the work is done for this application form.
Waiting for completion
On completing the process for each policy or account impacted, the child transactions will signal completion back to the parent case. The parent case will wait until all child transactions have signalled completion, and at that point the high level process will continue.
Bridging the gap
For an organisation to transition from product silos to becoming more customer-centric, it requires more than just a new Web site and some training for customer services representatives. In order to create the right experience across all your channels, all your products, and all your legacy systems, a solution that forms a bridge needs to be created.
Certain solutions can only help when data needs are being exactly met by your customer and the systems administering the customer are easy to integrate with. This is seldom true for all products in all geographies. Trade-offs could compromise the customer experience, so having a solution that can handle such situations can help provide organisations with a potentially quicker and more cost-effective bridge from customer to product-centric worlds. We believe AWD is that bridge.
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