How banks and credit unions can enhance efficiency in services delivery

The main reason for customer dissatisfaction and high churn rate is inefficient service delivery. Customers become unhappy when the services they have received fall short of what are promised. Because of this, they might move to your competitor. Conversely, when your bank ensures and maintains efficiency while delivering valuable services at competitive prices, it will be able to maximise future opportunities and profitability, and attract new customers by word-of-mouth recommendations from existing customers.

Innovative technologies, dynamic customer preferences and expectations, and industry competitiveness are constantly evolving. A financial service company must strive to reinvent its business processes to stay ahead in the market place. It will need continuous assessment of its enterprise performance, in order to identify areas that are inefficient and take vital steps to revamp accordingly.

So how can a bank optimise efficiency and lower costs of service delivery? An appropriate approach will be to set operational goals and constantly improve services offered with effective alternatives. Here are seven tips:

1. Legacy technology modernization. One major cause of inefficient service delivery is legacy systems, which have the tendency to slow down your bank’s capability to expand and adapt to changing market dynamics. They are costly to maintain and may lack necessary functionalities. For instance, you might be using an old banking system version, which might not have the essential capacities or cannot integrate with other systems. As such, you might not be able to take advantage of immediate opportunities.Revamping might involve building new functionalities on your existing system or implementing a new one. Whichever the case, having a strong modernisation strategy is vital in order to meet future demands. These will contribute to the efficiency of your enterprise offerings, cost savings from unnecessary support, IT team agility and adaptability to future requirements.
2. Channel optimization. How efficient are the various ways customers interact with your institution? Assessing customers’ interaction with your bank, both at brick and mortar and remotely, will enable you to improve performance and deliver more value. For instance, you can leverage your customer data across various platforms to enhance customer experiences, increase interactions, and generate incremental revenue, thereby driving high-value customer engagements with your bank.
3. Process improvement. Apart from products, people, and services, processes are the essential components of your business, as they power your operation. To illustrate, if the process required for one of your customers to pay for resources needed for its business, takes a long time to be completed on your platform, would imply inefficiency. How efficient are your current internal processes? Identifying business processes that can be improved, to take your operation to another level of success, is crucial. You might want to do an assessment of your internal processes with a view of finding new ways of making such processes to become faster, more efficient, more reliable and better. What differentiates a successful company from others is that it continuously seeks to outperform its last success.They are many process improvement techniques available and are worth exploring depending on your business needs. Identifying a suitable method and applying it to your institution will result in time saving, higher quality service delivery, improved customer satisfaction, and opportunities for revenue generation.
4. Team productivity. Encouraging your team members to take ownership of tasks is also very important. Using appropriate standard performance management techniques, such as clearly defining expectations and scorecards, improving motivation and rewards systems, and better training and supervision. Tools that streamline efficiency such as time and task tracking apps, and collaboration tools, can help improve staff productivity, enabling banks to handle more transactions and greater volumes of activity without increasing the usual number of personnel.
5. Having a culture of efficiency. A corporate culture that supports and values efficiency is important for it to be the norm of your bank. When management executives encourage the culture of efficiency amongst the staff, there will be improvements in service delivery that will result in profitability.
6. Intelligent automation. Automating processes in your enterprise will enable you to realise workflow efficiencies and service delivery improvements across a customer’s journey. As such, you can deploy self-service touch points and automate repeatable processes. For instance, you can implement an anti-money laundering solution to automate the verification of suspicious activities against fraud and blocking accounts, use two-factor authentication solution for access control, manage customer communication with multichannel notification solution, and managing customer transfers to help improve operational efficiencies and the customer experience.
7. Collaborative partnership. Partner and vendor management are other areas to review. It is important to focus on deriving the greatest possible value from a vendor or partner relationship. Selecting partners and vendors that have many years of industry experience and closely align with your bank’s business objectives is critical. More important is the synergy that must exist between your IT team and vendor/partner team. Otherwise, unnecessary complexities would arise that may result in time wastage and extra cost. Therefore, an effective collaboration of all stakeholders is necessary for the success of any the project.

JETHRO is here to assist as your fintech partner of choice in realizing your digital banking transformation initiatives with effective banking system implementation services and innovative solution offerings. Contact us today!