Mastek Blog

How Customer Insight Improves Performance

20-Apr-2016 06:34:02 / by Mick Bull

Mick Bull

Disastrous! That’s how digital transformation initiatives in the banking and financial services sector turn out when delivered without deep customer insight. Customer loyalty is now a fleeting memory confined mainly to pre-millennials. Yet, digital transformation is driving less and less direct human interaction between the customer and the institution.

Bank Counter 

Added to that, sluggish economic growth, ongoing low interest rates and regulatory demands continue to put pressure on budgets in today’s competitive, omni-channel environment. This makes it imperative for banking and financial services organisations to gain maximum customer insight from all available data.

Leveraging Data with Domain Expertise

Whilst customer insight is a common goal, every organisation has its own share of challenges and complexities. At Mastek, we revel in these challenges, enabling our Banking and Financial Services clients to leverage the wealth of data available to them. Using our domain experience, we help define an information strategy and create a roadmap to exploit all available data – structured, unstructured and third party data sources such as social media. Following which, we deliver a flexible solution that addresses all people, processes and technology aspects, ensuring that initial value is delivered at a very early stage.

Aligning Solutions with Business Goals

It is important to understand customer behaviour, particularly their propensity to buy products and services and treat them as a segment of one, as well as use analytics to underpin digital banking, which are critical elements of differentiation. These will be key considerations in personalising product and service offerings. 

Equally important is aligning employees to business strategy, to optimise execution and deliver the required performance. Defining, monitoring and communicating the right KPI metrics throughout the organisation to enable benchmarking and drive alignment across the business are therefore key indicators of success. Excellent self-service access to Business Intelligence on the ground for enabling identification of opportunities and increased business performance, is clearly a must-have.

Overall, the most critical value to be delivered is a positive impact on customer experience, acquisition, loyalty, wallet share and retention.  Common enablers include:

  • Personalised, customer level decision-making based on better identification of individuals, product affinity, customer worth and requirements matching
  • Improved customer experience through better agent knowledge of the customer and consistency of touchpoints
  • Identification of competitively-priced cross-sell/upsell opportunities by integrating external credit risk data and payment history
  • Improved agent performance and reduced fraud opportunity through a standardised KPI framework and information flow, supported by an incentive scheme – a happier and more engaged agent thereby leading to provision of better customer service.

Consolidating Information for a Common Goal

The business goals above are largely served by the provision of deeper insight through more mature analytic processes, based on a robust and consistent information platform.  However, this may not be easy to achieve!

Challenges that we have seen and been asked to address include: (graphically represent the bullets)

  • Multiple customer touch-points and data entry routes
  • Evolving business processes, often different in each international location
  • No single customer view
  • No single version of the truth; potential for performance misinterpretation across geographies
  • International issues: compliance with multiple financial services legislations
  • Issues with data quality and reconciliation
  • Uncontrolled proliferation of shadow IT
  • System performance failures causing unavailability during business hours
  • Multiplicity of reporting tools with no standardised corporate KPIs or self-service capability 

Improving MI Data Processing for IPF

Take our long-term customer IPF (International Personal Finance), an international home credit and digital loan provider. IPF operates in emerging markets across Europe and beyond, where demand for credit is growing and markets are relatively under provisioned. It remains Europe’s largest provider of home credit, small and short-term unsecured personal loans.

IPF was faced with many of the above aspirations and challenges, the most significant being a number of system performance bottlenecks that were making it difficult to achieve the required KPI reporting in timely enough fashion. These issues had to be ironed out first before considering the development of the deeper analytics.

So, how did it work out? See the infographic below for a snapshot view of how Mastek significantly improved the whole process of generating management information, giving IPF the platform to move towards deeper customer insight in a global environment.

Get further inspired on how insight can drive customer interaction and true digital transformation. Read Simona’s story here

 

 

Topics: Solution Showcase

Mick Bull

Written by Mick Bull

Business Intelligence Solutions Director

Subscribe to Email Updates

Lists by Topic

see all

Posts by Topic

see all

Recent Posts