Manish Bharti
The evolution of technology has altered user priorities for organisations and brought customer experience to the forefront. The BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sector is also becoming increasingly focused on digital transformation to create unique and seamless experiences for customers. According to a survey by Forrester Research, good customer service is the most highly valued attribute at both direct banks and multi-channel banks. And, RPA (robotic process automation) helps companies deliver this premium customer experience by providing enhanced services to customers through automating multiple redundant operations in the banking life cycle such as account documentation, account approval, new account set up, KYC review, customer service, and transaction processing and reconciliation. Let's take a closer look at how automation helps BFSI players deliver the ultimate customer experience.
Reimagined customer onboarding
Customer due diligence (CDD) and know your customer (KYC) are critical customer onboarding functions which are highly regulated. These due diligence processes help banks to assess the risk of new customers, and to determine the products and relationships that the bank can develop with them. RPA helps companies navigate through the compliance maze and build better relationships with their clients. As part of the KYC process, identifying a client’s main business countries, from its annual report, involves reading line-by-line documents that run hundreds of pages long, as well as pinpointing the paragraph and page number where the countries are found. By combining RPA with NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Machine Learning, robots can not only read and extract the data, but also classify it in order to reveal those countries where business operations are conducted.
Improve key processes to empower employees to better service customers
While some might argue the lack of real connection between the back-office and the customer-facing aspect of business management, it’s important to remember what happens to one side of the equation impacts the other. And, modifications to back office processes can impact the front office, because employees will have more time to focus on improving customer engagement, satisfaction, and retention.
With automation, one of the largest Japanese financial services companies, automated the daily transactions of large business customers which allowed them to close their branches 2 hours early every day. This results in increased productivity of employees, allowing them to focus on the customer. In addition, shortening these customer engagement transactions and timelines means companies can not only put more emphasis on the individual customer, but also allows companies to interact with a larger volume of customers, thus increasing the company’s outreach and footprint.
Jana Small Finance Bank, the largest microfinance institution in India, also leveraged RPA to automate key processes like ID management and Credit Card Report Generation and Verification, leading to a reduced turnaround time by 65-70%. Automation brought in more accuracy, and efficiency at every step and enabled employees to focus their energy on more engaging tasks.
Customer-facing automation and customer engagement
Customer-facing automation can completely transform how companies interact, communicate, and engage with their customers. What makes the automation of customer-facing tasks so valuable is it removes the burdensome, repetitive duties associated with serving the customer; while at the same time, allowing companies to actually interact with the customer to create long-term, productive business relationships.
In the contact center of a leading US bank, customer service agents were required to perform several calculations including, average daily balance, interest charge estimates and payoff amounts while on a call with the customer. These manual processes were prone to several errors resulting in inaccurate estimates, poor first call resolution rates and bad customer experience. By bringing in RPA and automating the calculations, the organisation increased compliance and reduced the average handle time by 20%.
With changing times, customer expectations are also changing. Customers want ease, simplicity, personalised treatment and a seamless experience. With automation, the BFSI industry can deliver this and much more.
Manish Bharti is President, UiPath India, South Asia and SAARC
Views expressed are personal.