Just look at how much the banking industry has changed over the past 50+ years. From the arrival in London of the first automatic teller machine in 1967, to the launch of the first banking websites in the mid-nineties, to the emergence of digital-only banks — also known as neo-banks - the banking industry has significantly transformed and will continue to do so in the years ahead.

I can even remember a time that I carried around a bank book and waited in line after work, or on my lunch break, to withdraw or deposit money, ask a question or solve a problem. Those kinds of interactions were personal, but in 2019, it's become difficult to imagine leaving my office or home to speak with a customer service agent in person when I can easily connect with a representative online.

It's no wonder digital transformation is top of mind for today's financial companies as they work to upgrade their business models, products and services with next-gen technologies. Today's young consumers gravitate toward mobile utility, with Millennials and Gen Zers preferring to handle their banking via digital means first, then in branch if necessary. To drive this point home - by the end of July of this year, neo-banks, such as Chime, Empower and Aspiration, had secured $2.5 billion in venture capital funding, according to CB insights.

Modern consumers don't just expect a seamless customer experience, they also demand personalisation and transparency. A growing familiarity with mobile technologies and social media makes them more likely to interact with banks through digital platforms. It stands to reason that traditional banks should be reinventing their customer experience to satisfy consumers' wants and needs.

And they are taking note. According to recent research conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC), businesses the world over are expected to spend $1.18 trillion on digital transformation by the end of the year. That's an increase of close to 18% over 2018.

Today's highly competitive business landscape requires that financial services brands integrate digital enablement into their existing infrastructure and leverage next-gen technology to derive actionable insights and intelligence from the data they capture via customer interactions. DX (digital experience) and CX (customer experience) are closely linked, and financial brands of all kinds will benefit from successfully making this connection.

Traditional Banks Play Catch Up

Most traditional banks will tell you they have an airtight strategy for DX. Most will also tell you that supercharging their operations is a big challenge. In fact, IDG’s The State of Digital Business Transformation 2019 study reports that while 91% of companies plan to implement a digital-first approach to business processes, just 48% have done so to date.

The rapid evolution of coveted technologies, and the speed with which competitors are adopting them put pressure on businesses to address digital transformation. But with the urgency to evolve comes trepidation, and that can lead to stumbling blocks. Many traditional banks are left wondering about the best approach.

FinTechs Face Challenges of Their Own

It's clear that traditional banks must work to transform themselves. But what about the neo-banks and FinTechs? Unlike traditional financial institutions, these organisations have been built on a foundation of digital technology. FinTechs have an advantage in that they can set up their digital infrastructure in a tech-forward manner.

Today's young consumers gravitate toward mobile utility, with Millennials and Gen Zers preferring to handle their banking via digital means first, then in branch if necessary.

And yet, FinTechs must navigate hurdles of their own. While they have a leg up on traditional banks when it comes to technology, they may find themselves lacking in another area: human capital.

Having skilled human agents on hand to handle more complex customer queries is something traditional banks tend to have in spades because they understand the value of high-touch service. Personal attention, empathy and the ability to address even the most complicated of customer issues makes human agents a critical component of customer service, regardless of how much technology you have on hand.

As noted by the Harvard Business Review, "Service can be emotional; technology cannot." Because humans are inherently social creatures, "taking away the opportunity for this kind of connection can undermine service performance." And that, in turn, can undermine your brand.

DX + CX = Comprehensive Customer Care

All of this is to say that both traditional banks and FnTechs have unique advantages, and it behooves them to take a cue from each other's approaches. As they continue to evolve and transform to meet the needs of today's customers, they must ensure they're providing both technology and a human touch.

This will require a road map that's customised for their business. Traditional banks are likely to find themselves focusing on digital customer service channels and using artificial intelligence to better gauge consumers' needs.

Based on the results of its retail banking study — which shows that Millennials are switching banks at a rate 2.5 times higher than Baby Boomers and 1.5 times greater than Gen Xers — Gallup recommends that banks invest in technology that can predict their customers' problems, ease communication across channels, and take a more data-based approach to shaping the customer journey.

For FinTechs and neo-banks, the emphasis should be on making CX more human. Using data to tailor solutions to customers' needs is useful, but be sure to have a skilled customer care team in place to answer the questions that will inevitably arise.

Personal attention, empathy and the ability to address even the most complicated of customer issues makes human agents a critical component of customer service, regardless of how much technology you have on hand.

At TELUS International, we address these different yet congruent needs by helping financial companies embrace digital transformation through learning solutions and process consulting. By way of our financial services priority vertical, we help clients establish a game plan to dramatically improve the overall customer experience.

Providing customers with effortless interactions wherever they go, and however they choose to engage with your brand is the key to creating a positive customer experience and building loyalty and trust. Going beyond this would be through offering personalised and anticipatory interactions for customers, along with human agents ready to step in whenever needed.

Whether a financial brand is starting from digital or transforming to digital, a simultaneous focus on customer-centricity and the incorporation of emerging technologies will be what drives sustainable success.

In July, global customer experience provider Voxpro - powered by TELUS International, hosted a major event at its Centre of Excellence in Dublin, Ireland, entitled The Future of Money. Over one hundred FinTech innovators from around the world gathered to discuss the current state of the cryptocurrency industry, regulatory and operational challenges, and the opportunities that lie ahead.

“If you ask any crypto company what their biggest issue is, they're not going to tell you regulation; they're going to tell you getting bank accounts.”

That’s according to Jeremy Allaire, Founder & CEO of Circle - a speaker at The Future of Money event in Dublin. Allaire, whose company recently acquired cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex, revealed the significant obstacles that traditional banking institutions are putting in the path of his industry.

“Banks have pretty systematically limited companies’ ability to operate in this space, and that really is a challenge. I think part of that is regulatory uncertainty and part of it is just hostility to a technology which basically threatens to eliminate a lot of their profit margin and business models.”

Allaire believes the solution lies in the establishment of ‘”crypto-native banks” that will work closely with both crypto companies and central banks to provide the connectivity that is urgently needed.

The fact that traditional banks are under threat at all points to a fundamental shift in how the world views money, something that David Schwartz, Chief Cryptographer at Ripple, believes was inevitable in an increasingly global economy. Schwartz told the Dublin audience that the key problem with money as we know it is that it is neither “universal nor interoperable” and that currency needs to be one or the other if it is to serve the modern economy.

“If it was universal and everybody in the world could accept it with equal ease, then that would be fine. And if it could operate with other systems that other people use, that would be fine too. If you're stuck on an island as the economy becomes increasingly global and more and more people want to do business internationally, but have to do it through intermediaries and slow systems, then we start to really hit the problems created by that system.”

So how exactly does cryptocurrency solve this ‘money problem’? Schwartz pointed to the example of how financial services company Cuallix is using XRP, a digital currency created by Ripple, to move money between the United States and Mexico. Instead of relying on the conventional method, which is very expensive and takes several days, Cuallix buys XRP the moment they need it and a few seconds later sells it for Mexican Pesos. The speed of the transaction avoids the market volatility of both the peso and cryptocurrency, and, according to Schwartz, makes the whole process up to 60% cheaper.

As the adoption of cryptocurrency rapidly grows, so will the need for a new kind of infrastructure to support it, particularly with a view to enhancing the customer experience. Jeremy Allaire of Circle described how a new infrastructure layer of the internet is going to allow a lot of the functions currently performed by the financial industry, mostly record keeping in very proprietary siloed systems, to run on the open internet, at a radically lower cost, and with a much better consumer experience.

And he foresees a new wave of industry enabling this shift: “There are going to be very significant large technology companies built that support the move to crypto finance, just like there have been really big technology companies that have supported the move into digital media and digital communications.”

Gregoire Vigroux, a Vice President at TELUS International Europe, shared a powerful prediction with the audience at The Future of Money event. “Within just a few years, over 95% of the world’s population will hold cryptocurrencies.” Moreover, he believes that we are currently witnessing a landmark moment in history, telling the audience:

“If this was the early 1990s, we would have a panel of internet professionals telling us that the internet is coming and is going to represent a major disruption. Well, it’s now 2018 and today we’re talking about the biggest revolution since the dawn of the internet – cryptocurrency.”

The disruption of traditional financial institutions is being fuelled in part by cutting-edge customer (CX) and user (UX) experiences that are now being offered by digital currency providers. Today, more and more FinTech innovators are forming partnerships with customer experience experts like Voxpro – powered by TELUS International, in order to successfully capitalise on crypto’s increasing popularity.

With experience powering customer operations for some of the world’s leading technology companies, Voxpro has the agility, talent, and digital capabilities to ensure a world-class end-to-end experience for every user, even during periods of intense onboarding.

Leading exchange Binance, for example, recently experienced onboarding rates of up to 250,000 new users per day. If that company fails to successfully deal with the increased levels of customer contact that will naturally come their way, those users may head straight to a competitor. As crypto approaches mass adoption, companies must prioritise investments in their customer experience in order to avoid brand-devaluing issues that can come with a major spike in business.

At the end of the day, the overall customer experience provided by companies is what will differentiate them in an increasingly competitive market. Simply put, the FinTech and cryptocurrency brands that ‘put their money where their mouths are’ when it comes to investing in their customer and user experience will win the day in the modern economy.

Contact details:

telusinternational.com

voxprogroup.com

Interested in scaling your company, or has the scaling process already begun? We connected with Dan Kiely, CEO of Voxpro - powered by TELUS International, a leading provider of customer experience, technical support, and sales operations, to discuss how to scale your business, and the importance of maintaining focus on customer service as your company grows.

What is scaling your company all about?

If you’re scaling your company, congratulations! It’s an exciting time for all involved. At Voxpro - powered by TELUS International, we use the term ‘blitzscale’, which was coined by Reid Hoffman, Co-founder of LinkedIn and PayPal. Learning from the growth of other companies, we’ve realized that if you don’t scale fast enough, you’re going to lose your lead, or even worse – someone could take your idea.

In the early days of developing Voxpro, we had an idea for a new approach to outsourcing, and knew we had to act on it immediately, before anyone else did. We blitzscaled – we opened more offices, hired more people, and signed on more partners. After doubling our workforce and quadrupling the number of countries where we had a home base, we increased our services in two years. Then, in the summer of 2017, we partnered with TELUS International - a customer experience and digital services firm with a footprint across four continents. By joining our two companies, we are now backed by TELUS International’s robust global infrastructure and have an enhanced ability to offer a more comprehensive suite of solutions to the brands we serve to enable new go-to-market opportunities and growth in the digital and IT services market.

Scaling your company is about finding the right partners, but it’s also about hiring all-around good, hard workers, having a mission you really believe in, and creating a strong brand for your employees. Our experience as a former start-up, then scale-up translates into our innate ability to do the same for other brands, helping them scale their customer experience operations while they grow their business.

Why do you believe scaling customer experience and scaling business operations go hand-in-hand?

As your business grows, your customer base should ideally grow at the same or a similar pace. Growing your customer base means an increased number of support inquiries, and keeping up with demand to deliver a strong customer experience is crucial to maintaining your brand’s integrity and attracting and retaining customers. Take our partner Airbnb for instance. They went from hosting 300,000 homes on their site in 2013 to 3,000,000 homes in 2017. To meet the needs of their customers, Airbnb recently launched its Experiences and Places platforms, connecting their renters to local activities and hidden gems in the cities they are visiting. Giving power to the people, Airbnb increased its offering while managing a positive customer experience to meet the interest of its users.

As CEO of a growing company, what are some of your critical practices for relaying important information to your employees, and keeping the business moving?

When we created Voxpro, we set in place a series of values that we hold ourselves to every day. Sometimes, setting and understanding a company’s values can be overlooked, but not for us. Our values aren’t just words on a page, rather they drive our great company culture. These values also guide the partnerships we form, such as with TELUS International. They are a like-minded partner with similar values, and together, we are building upon our shared commitment to fostering and sustaining a caring culture focused on team member engagement and development, and giving back to the communities where we work and live.

Our powerful C-Suite leadership team that includes Jeffrey Puritt, President and CEO of TELUS International, keeps a pulse on our culture and employee engagement, identifying issues and putting forward solutions. We know that people want to be in an inclusive environment, even as a company begins to scale. Our values strive to ignite a sense of entrepreneurship, ownership and operational beauty in people. Through operational beauty, we encourage our employees to grow both personally and professionally. Having a purpose and mission that your employees can get behind will add motivation, plus heart and soul, to a company. This is ultimately reflected in the customer experience that we deliver.

The FinTech industry is seeing a number of companies scale at the moment. Are you seeing any emerging trends?

We partner with a number of companies who are in that “sweet spot” in the scaling process – they’re no longer a start-up, but they aren’t quite on a level of recognition internationally, or globally mature yet. Many times, these organizations are feeling the growing pains and recognize the need for a strong customer experience partner to ensure continued customer satisfaction and reduce customer loss. It can be a big step for companies to recognize that they need additional support, and a BPO provider in a lot of instances can be the smart choice when expanding.

Regarding FinTech, two of our partners who are leaders in the space come to mind. Both companies were searching for a partner to help manager their customer service as their businesses quickly grew. We partnered with them by offering a customized selection of services. Multi-channel, multi-lingual, and social media management were of importance to one, while our partnership with the other FinTech company focused solely on managing safety, fraud, and risk. In each instance, we were able to rapidly onboard and provide the necessary support, so their customers did not feel any strain from the expanding organization. Each of these partners’ needs are vastly different, and that’s what makes what we do and what we can provide so exciting. It’s not a one-size fits all model.

In what ways can scaling companies manage the customer experience for their clients in times of hyper-growth?

When rapidly growing a business, executives must come together to answer difficult questions in order to strategically plan for the future – “Can we do this alone? Do we need advanced services? Can we afford to make a change in staffing?” For some companies, outsourcing a sector of their business becomes an option, but sometimes companies are tentative to do so. It’s important for executives to understand that it’s more efficient and productive to focus on what you’re best at - your core competencies and what has made you successful to date - and seek a trusted partner in other departments, especially customer service.

Also, when rapidly scaling, the need to incorporate digital services and next-gen technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to grow. It’s important to have a trusted partner already invested in these capabilities and have a knowledgeable team in place able to harness the power of innovation to drive your new business outcomes and customer loyalty.After all, your customers are what drive your business and solidify your reputation in the market.

It’s important to keep your customers happy while scaling, of course, but what about your employees? How should growing companies respond to the challenges of retaining current employees and recruiting new ones?

As part of your growth, it’s inevitable that you’re going to have to hire and onboard new employees and also ensure the ones you currently employ continue to be inspired and engaged through all the changes. Ingraining your company’s values in new hires should be a top priority as these new employees have the potential to either help or hinder the execution of your company’s mission and strategy. Set yourself to a standard, and don’t stray away from it.

We have Voxpro University, which serves as a training resource plus a compilation of our branded learning and development tools, and TELUS International University, which enables our employees to earn a subsidized degree while working. These types of programs serve as a platform for all employees to learn about our culture and grow personally and professionally with us in order to meet the business needs of our partners’ today and tomorrow.

About Dan Kiely:

Dan Kiely is an entrepreneur through and through. Heading up Voxpro - powered by TELUS International, Dan thrives in the entrepreneurial realm. He dreams big and encourages innovation in all aspects of his company. Dan is now also a member of the TELUS International leadership team with TELUS International President and CEO, Jeffrey Puritt.

With 28,000 team members across North and Central America, Europe and Asia, TELUS International is a global business process outsourcing (BPO) provider that delivers contact center, information technology and advisory solutions across fast-growing technology, financial services and FinTech, travel and hospitality and healthcare industries.

Michael Ringman is TELUS International’s Chief Information Officer, where he is responsible for supporting omnichannel solutions that enable the rapid growth and evolution of the company’s clients’ brands. Here, Mike discusses the rise of omnichannel to deliver a personalised and connected customer experience that is critical for brands in our increasingly digitized world.   

Omnichannel is still considered a relatively new strategy when discussing customer service delivery. What is omnichannel and why is it becoming the new norm for brands wanting to deliver exceptional customer experiences?

Nowadays, consumers are using an average of five connected devices to access voice, email, chat, social media and self-service when conducting product research and completing purchases. In response to this changing dynamic between consumer and brand, companies must keep pace by offering multiple touchpoints in order to provide seamless connections and instant gratification as customers switch between an e-commerce site, to a smartphone, to a physical store.

An omnichannel strategy involves these cohesive channels, working together to create a unified brand experience, ensuring the customer gets the same service, support, and information, regardless of how they interact with the brand. Unfortunately, in many companies, these channels still often exist in silos, or at best, a multichannel environment where multiple support channel are offered but not necessarily integrated with one another

With customer service outpacing the product as a deciding factor in many instances, brands must evolve to an omnichannel strategy to keep their customers. In fact, according to a study by the Aberdeen Group, companies with an omnichannel strategy retain on average 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement.

Are there particular industries that should be incorporating omnichannel strategies?

Beyond retail, where omnichannel had its start, today’s booming online sales and customer growth across all industries, including  banking, healthcare and travel, have made keeping up with consumer behaviour a universal objective. Consumer goods and customer-facing brands, both big and small, need to meet service and efficiency challenges across multiple channels. The new kids on the block – the industry disruptors like Airbnb and Uber – have been focused on delivering a connected, convenient and personalized omnichannel experience right from the start of their business. It’s part of their mentality and company DNA in order to differentiate themselves from established brands. The pressure is now on traditional businesses to make the shift to omnichannel.

How can a company assess their readiness to transition to omnichannel?

When contemplating a shift to omnichannel, it’s important to recognize that it’s not simply about technology. A successful omnichannel strategy will be a blend of people, processes and technology. In order to create and implement a clear strategy, it’s important to understand both the key challenges and requirements needed for effective enablement, which can be split across two categories – human capital and technology. It may sound odd coming from someone in the IT sector, but I would argue that people take precedence over technology. It’s not just the physical setup that needs to change, but how an organisation thinks about—and manages—its business.

You need the support of the entire organisation to foster a culture that is ready to embrace a customer's first paradigm shift, including C-level executives who can remove any silos that may exist, as well as knowledgeable and inspired contact center agents who are able to engage with customers across different channels. To help companies assess their readiness to transition to omnichannel, Everest Group in partnership with TELUS International released an assessment checklist that covers all aspects of making the jump.

The move to omnichannel can be a daunting proposition for some. How can companies plan ahead to make the shift less intimidating while also increasing their likelihood of success?

The initial focus should be to understand where your company stands today in its omnichannel readiness – and where it wants to go. Once established, companies need to ensure they build the following critical success factors into their planning: ensure a customer-centric approach, secure the direct involvement and support of senior leadership, ready the organisation for change on both the people and technology fronts, and align corporate culture with omnichannel imperatives by fostering the right mindset and behaviours among the entire team. By bringing into line people, processes and technology requirements before making the transition, you can expect to drive an enhanced customer experience, see a top-line impact and experience a reduced cost of operations.

Once a company has made or has started to make the transition to omnichannel, how can they measure their success and ensure that they are on the right track to meeting their targets and goals?

When implementing and measuring the success of an omnichannel strategy, you must be aware of the need to adjust key performance indicators (KPIs). This should include adding in, or in some instances, swapping out ‘unfriendly’ customer service metrics for more meaningful and ‘human’ metrics.

Average Handle Time (AHT) is a great example of a metric that only offers a two-dimensional perspective of a three-dimensional world. For example, an agent’s handle time may be high; but what if the customer’s experience was improved because the agent took the extra time to assist him with an issue?

In the age of omnichannel, brands should focus on metrics like First Call Resolution (FCR), which will be a much better indicator of great customer service and will give agents ‘permission’ to take the necessary time to fully address a customer’s issues and own the customer experience from start to finish. Other KPIs, such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Likelihood to Recommend (L2R), are great for getting customers to self-report how they view their relationship with the brand, which provides another layer of data that will help brands better understand their customers and further personalise their experience in the future.

How can brands get the most out of their omnichannel data once implemented?

In order to capitalise on an omnichannel strategy post-implementation, the type of data you collect as well as how you store and analyse it should be a key consideration. It’s important to capture both big data (e.g.: tracking searches on your website) and small data (e.g.: one-on-one conversations between an agent and a customer) from each of your different channels, and to store it in a central data repository. This enables you to analyze it by channel to quickly identify channel-specific challenges, but also affords you the opportunity to view it as a whole in order to help highlight your customers’ likes, dislikes and habits. Leveraged in a thoughtful and timely fashion, this data will reduce reaction times to problems and help to  proactively address them in some instances; identify trends in what your customers want and how, when and where they want it; and inform the evolution of your product(s) so that you continue to meet the wants and needs of consumers.

What do you see as the future of omnichannel?

In the near future, an omnichannel customer experience won’t be a ‘nice to have’; it will be a matter of survival for brands in competitive industries as customer service becomes increasingly prioritized by consumers. Customer service will no longer be about voice, chat, digital and email support in isolation. Instead a blend of channels, supporting integrated customer interactions will become an established consumer expectation. Complemented by the rise in artificial intelligence as well as more skilled and knowledgeable agents, omnichannel will foster an increasingly personalised and consistent customer experience to further differentiate brands to an ever wider set of customers.

Website: https://www.telusinternational.com/