5 Benefits of Digitizing Your Back-End Process

By Kelly Wilson - Aug 29, 2018

Organizations are scrambling to stay ahead of their competitors in the finance industry, with digitizing the back-end process being at the forefront of innovation. However, 87% of financial organizations don’t believe their current core systems can keep pace with customer-facing initiatives. And with 60% of customer dissatisfaction originating from the back-end of financial organizations, it’s clear that inefficient back-end processes can have a negative impact on customer experience. Complex legacy IT systems, manual paper-based processes and orphaned data sources often result in high costs, poor agility, plus the customer issues of delayed response-time and lack of a seamless experience. 64% of consumers saying that they expect companies to respond to them in real-time, however, how are they able to correspond with your organization in real-time if your back-end isn’t digitally enabled and ready to respond? Digitizing the back-end process within your financial organization is crucial for the success of customer-facing channels and can have a significant impact on your organization’s potential growth.

Ready to learn more about upgrading your institution’s digital presence and capabilities? Download our Ultimate Guide to Digitally Transforming the Appointment Experience today.

Improve Customer Experience, Increase Efficiency, Cut Costs

One of the key reasons to digitize the back-end is that it enables you to differentiate your customer journey, and offer customers unique benefits such as 24/7 access, real-time responses, and personalized experiences.

Other than improving the customer experience, digitizing your back-end process also allows for an increase in efficiency and cut down on costs.  Lloyds Banking Group invested in a digital back-end technology that reduced the time it took to do certain processes by 90%.  By reducing processes within your organization you will increase efficiency and subsequently boost revenue.  According to Capgemini, automating back-end processes can help banks save 30% of their annual costs. From the process to error remediation, to training costs, overall savings can be significant.

Digital Optimization Implementations

Digitizing your back-end process in order to support your customer-facing channels, improve customer experience and enhance the productivity of your business may sound like an overwhelming undertaking. Where should your organization start?

Ideally, you should start by automating one section of the customer journey. You can start by asking yourself a few questions:

• Which elements of the customer journey require significant manual effort to deploy on the back-end
• Which elements of the customer journey are resulting in significant customer dissatisfaction?
• Are there tactical solutions available to automate these manual processes?
• Which solutions can be implemented quickly to start delivering benefits immediately?

One great place to start is your first customer touchpoint: scheduling an appointment. Having appointment scheduling as the first touchpoint means that it is your customers’ first impression of your organization, meaning that you have the opportunity to form a positive relationship with your customers based on the quality of the experience that you provide.

Identifying an area in the customer journey in need of change is a great place to start, and implementing a tool that is user-friendly and able to integrate into both customer-facing and back-end processes is an effective first step. The digital transformation occurring in the financial services industry at the moment is relatively new and your organization, as well as your customers, need something that will allow a smooth transition into the future of banking technology.

Enterprise appointment scheduling is a tool that enhances customer-facing channels while also streamlining the back-end processes in your organization.  It can be implemented organization-wide, into your contact center’s appointment scheduling process, in branch as well as online, providing a new appointment scheduling channel to your customers.  This is beneficial to the back-end processes of your organization for multiple reasons such as …

Consolidated Customer Behaviour Data

Because the channel is integrated organization-wide, every appointment scheduling channel–contact center, branch locations, head office– will have access to the same appointment data.  This allows for your organization to speed up the scheduling process because there will be no need to correspond with other employees in other areas of your organization to ensure that no appointments are double booked or missed by advisors because they were not informed of the scheduled appointment.

All scheduled appointments and staff availability would be sync across all platforms to ensure appointment scheduling accuracy and that no appointment slots or advisors get double booked due to miscommunication between the two channels.

Track Appointment Analytics

Integrated appointment scheduling syncs data across all appointment channels in your organization, but also offers your contact center staff the ability to capture additional customer information prior to the appointment, like past financial needs, what brought them to your organization, and who will be attending the appointment. This can help improve the quality of the in-person interaction. Post-appointment, having the ability to track appointment success rate as well as no-show rate allows your organization some insight into valuable sales information around product and services, as well as operational inefficiencies that you can address with a more targeted plan in the future.

Coconut Software offers clients a host for appointment analytics which helps highlight friction points in the customer-facing appointment scheduling journey such as:

• Where in the scheduling process customers are dropping off before submitting the appointment request
• What branch locations book the most appointments
• which staff are providing the highest customer satisfaction according to customers.

Using the back-end process of enterprise scheduling to track analytics allows your organization the ability to assess the processes it has in place in order to provide the best service possible to its customers.

Optimize Staff Times in One Program

In large organizations, it can get chaotic to keep track of all of the information on customer-facing staff in order to schedule appointments. You need to track staff availability as well as updated qualifications, and hosting all of your customer-facing employee data on one platform allows your organization to run as smoothly as possible.  With enterprise scheduling, you can host advisor data on a platform that is organization-wide and able to be updated in real-time. This enhances the organization within your company and supports the customer-facing scheduling channels.

Scheduling with unavailable or unqualified advisors is a back-end nightmare for your organization, and something that is easily avoidable by the implementation of an organization-wide, customer-facing and back-end appointment scheduling tool. Scheduling an appointment through Coconut Software’s appointment scheduling platform, your customers will only ever be paired with advisors who are available in the time slot that works for them and who is qualified to fulfill the appointment service that they require.

Enhancing customer-facing channels has additional benefits other than improving the customer experience.  Your customer experience and customer-facing channels are only as strong as the back-end processes in your organization that support them.  Enable your organization to run as efficiently as possible by implementing enterprise appointment scheduling that integrates into both your customer-facing channels as well as your back-end processes, giving you the best of both worlds and elevating the functionality of your financial services organization.

Digitizing Your Back-End Process – What’s Next?

Ready to learn more about upgrading your institution’s digital presence and capabilities? Download our Ultimate Guide to Digitally Transforming the Appointment Experience for an in depth look on how to make it as smooth as possible for everyone involved, and how Coconut Software can help get you there.

Looking to boost revenue and deliver a premium experience to your clients? Schedule a consultation with Coconut Software to learn more about how our appointment scheduling solutions can get you there.