Improving the Customer Experience with IT Automation

What do companies with great customer service have in common? One answer: advanced technology.

Adobe’s “2019 Digital Trends” report found that leading customer experience companies are “four-and-a-half times more likely than other companies to have a highly integrated, cloud-based technology stack (32% vs. 7%).” How does this finding apply to banks?

It’s all about IT automation. IT automation has a ripple effect that benefits the entire bank and its customers. As banks are facing mounting competitive pressures from areas like big tech and fintech, IT needs to move faster and smarter to keep up and support other areas of the business as they strive to innovate the customer journey. Workflow and process automation enables IT to focus on what’s most important, drives digitalization in all areas of the bank, and ultimately allows for a better customer experience. Here’s how.

Increase Time to Focus On Mission-Critical Initiatives

Without automation, IT personnel spend too much time on tasks that don’t make the best use of their abilities. They could be spending time on security, business intelligence, or app development, but instead, they spend too much time resetting passwords or manually fixing inaccurate reports. IT leaders must use their staff wisely and strategically on the projects that will deliver the most value: moving the needle to reach corporate goals. This means they can spend more time refining technology to ensure the IT department is functioning excellently. Automation can help.

The Royal Bank of Scotland, for example, implemented ServiceNow ITSM, which helped them automate over 50% of the controls associated with critical IT processes. By making this change, “RBS saved the equivalent of 46,000 employee hours.” That’s 46,000 hours those talented employees could spend on doing important work to further the bank’s goals.

Recommended Download: 2020 Technology Survey for U.S. Commercial Banks Benchmark Report

Drive Digitalization Throughout All Areas of the Bank

When IT operations are automated, other departments feel the benefits, too. Not only do employees get help on their IT issues faster, but they can dedicate more resources to digitizing and automating their departments, too.

For example, with ServiceNow, employees can log a ticket in the ITSM portal when they need assistance with technology. Analysts can manage these tickets in a centralized portal and report on any incidents. This system leads to faster, more streamlined support that allows employees to focus on the most important aspects of their jobs. 

IT personnel with more time to innovate can improve processes for people and machines from the front office to the back office. For example, IT personnel can use technology to improve how risk is calculated, as well as ways to track revenue and improve customer experience.

ProcessMaker shares another example of how IT automation can, by extension, help banks’ HR departments function better: “A customer interaction with a chatbot can trigger a support ticket or application process in workflow software without the customer entering a brick-and-mortar location or tying up staff. This way, human resources can be reapplied to tasks that are more integral to the company.”

Provide Higher-Quality Customer Service

It’s no surprise that banks need to improve and speed up their processes in all areas. One important step to achieving these goals is through IT automation. These processes help other employees as well as other areas of the bank and, ultimately, customers. Why? When core IT services run better, IT personnel can put energy into innovating in other areas of the bank such as the customer journey.

Additionally, IT automation can help employees overcome barriers to providing excellent customer service. Today, some of these barriers include using data analytics, leveraging technology, and getting a 360-degree view of the customer. 

“This is unsurprising considering the complex IT infrastructure and inflexible legacy systems of most banking and financial businesses,” says Laurie Ehrbar, a member of the Forbes Communications Council. “By simplifying technology and streamlining customer engagement processes with automation, banks can leverage customer insights and data analytics to provide more relevant products and services to customers, or they can deliver communication through the customer’s choice of media, such as email or text message (SMS).”

With IT automated, freeing up IT team members to deliver faster resolution times to other bank employees, those bank employees are then able to spend more time doing the work that most benefits customers.

Learn how Crossfuze can help

With the mounting competitive pressures bearing down on the traditional model of banking, IT automation provides IT with a proven way to turn their attention to the projects that have the most impact on the growth goals of the bank.

Crossfuze has helped banks around the globe, from CoBank to Movement Mortgage and more, implement these processes in their operations using ServiceNow. To learn more about how these processes enable IT to become more innovative, reach out to us at LetsTalk@crossfuze.com.