Covid-19 came upon us like a ton of bricks and left the world in disbelief – how does an entire planet come to a grinding halt?! Businesses were forced to hit the ground running and dust off and tap into their business continuity manuals. While the world was waiting to get ‘back to normal’, unbeknownst to the world, they had begun the process of adapting to the ‘new normal!
The almost worldwide lockdown led to an immediate shift to full-time remote work. Periodic Covid-19 variants and waves have meant ‘work-from-home’ is the way it is for the foreseeable future. With consumers and customers being bound indoors, service providers had to scale and tap into technology to reach customers. And this led to a great deal of reshaping through digital collaboration and remote communication tools. More so for the customer-facing services sector.
Prior to the pandemic, the financial services sector had already begun to transition their customers to mobile and remote solutions. With the lockdown, financial institutions had to ramp up tech capabilities at a scorching pace and embrace digital collaborations rapidly to keep their operations going, to soothe and reassure anxious customers and to continue serving them. The challenge before the financial services sector was how to balance customer needs with the cost of personalized support. As also, how to meet rising expectations of customers as they became more comfortable with technology. The strain on this sector was immense. Through tech tie-ups, the use of digital collaboration and artificial intelligence technologies, financial institutions have been able to provide 24/7 seamless customer experiences.
The big question for the financial services sector was how would the adoption of digital collaboration tools in workflows impact the delivery of customer service?
As it plays out, Digital Collaborations have……
Encouraged Knowledge Sharing Amongst Teams
Knowledge sharing between departments has always been critical to delivering efficient and positive customer experiences. Unfortunately, many organizations in the financial services sector still lack centralized systems with updated information flows related to business processes and this lack of integration leads to complicated coordination between teams, inconsistent communication and an inefficient use of resources, hurting employee productivity and ultimately having its impact on customer delivery. Digital collaborations have helped address the inter/intra department communication gap.
Facilitated Faster Decision Making
One of the most significant factors affecting customer experience in the financial services sector is the speed of service delivery. Customers expect fast processing times for services. Digital collaboration modalities have streamlined processes, made workflows efficient, improved communication channels, thereby leading to speedier decision making and a vast improvement with positive customer experiences.
Increased Productivity
Digital collaboration tools go beyond facilitating communication. Instead, when employed for business processes, they streamline information flow, makes decision making quicker and lead to a collapse of time to arrive at customer-centric solutions, thereby positively impacting productivity and decreasing operational costs.
Streamlined Workflows
Complex tasks that require frequent communication or processes with multiple decision points suffer the most from the lack of a centralized point of collaboration. Digital collaboration tools to the rescue!
While evaluating opportunities for digital collaborations, the financial services sector has had to carefully consider and manage the impending change, as deployments and adoptions can be challenging and are related to:
Culture: One of the biggest challenges to digital collaborations is managing internal expectations, given the more risk-averse and traditional culture of the financial services sector. Tech ramp ups typically call for tectonic shifts not only in technology but at a ‘way we do business’ level.
Making the cut: Having the appropriate controls, processes and policies in place to pass assessments on compliance, legal, risk and procurement level, can be challenging and very time consuming.
Scaling and legacy: Many financial institutions have large legacy IT platforms that need to be updated and maintained to conform to changing regulations, to support growth and cost optimization initiatives. Simultaneously, they need to enable integration with emerging technologies at scale. All of this demands various cultural shifts and the ability to manage change.
In conclusion, one thing is clear – Digital is not taking a pause. Digital is now central to just about everything we do. From connecting with colleagues and loved ones through the web, to managing globalized supply chains in the cloud, to building a portfolio of software-enabled offerings, digital has become not just a tool we use to aid our life and work but humanity’s essential and irreplaceable one.
EZDynamic is a boutique Management Consulting firm, based in New York, which caters to the Financial Services sector and are adept with handling digital collaborations and transformations for your organization.
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