CHAPTER 01
Drivers of Personalised, Customer-Centric Services
It’s called The Amazon Effect. The world’s biggest online retailer has transformed the way that many of us expect to be treated by the companies we buy from.
Log onto Amazon and they immediately load up your search history. They can make recommendations of things you might like to buy and deliver those things the next day. They can even provide access to third-party sellers for items they don’t have themselves.
There is huge potential for this model in banking, financial services and insurance. If financial organisations can utilise the vast amount of customer data they hold, the opportunity to create personalised or tailored services is virtually unlimited.
For example, imagine if a bank could analyse a customer’s transactions to identify the right time to offer them information about mortgages, or home insurance policies. Taking the idea further, an insurance company could use geo-location data from a consumer’s mobile device to offer a discount on insurance if a vehicle had not been used for an extended period of time.
Although such services may not be widespread yet, customer expectations of financial institutions are certainly heading in this direction. It’s no longer seen as acceptable to complete paper forms and wait days or weeks to get a new financial or insurance product set up, which is often still the case in corporate insurance and related services.
The challenge for BFSI organisations isn’t understanding the potential of personalisation. Rather, it’s understanding how to identify and utilise the right customer data to deliver this type of customer-centric service. Many established players in the industry have technology platforms built over decades, with data held in silos, and little integration between different systems.
Creating personalised services like those described above requires multiple data sets to be integrated seamlessly in real-time, and new processes created to understand and act upon this data. It’s an increasingly pressing challenge, not least because of growing competition from a new generation of start-ups and fintech companies. These new vendors can implement personalised data services quickly, thanks to agile technology systems created from the ground up, with customer-centricity in mind.
IT leaders face the challenge of balancing the need to develop innovative, personalised service with the pressure to reduce costs, while interest rates are plummeting, says Gianfilippo Pandolfini, Chief Executive, BNP Paribas.
We have to do two things at the same time. We must rethink our customer journey to deliver excellent quality services but, at the same time, we have to use as much technology as possible to reduce our cost base.
Gianfilippo Pandolfini | Chief Executive at BNP Paribas
Mindtree believes the key to meeting these challenges is intelligent IT strategy, and better use of customer data. “In order to provide a personalised service for your customers, you need to be able to reach them via the right channels, at the right time and with the right, relevant message or product that resonates with them. You can only do this if you’re able to derive the right data insights from all their touchpoints, enabling you to see the entire customer journey end to end, and therefore adding value to your customer,” says Beteja Dovao, Senior Advisor, BFSI at Mindtree.
Next: Chapter 02
Opportunities and Best Practice in Modern Data Strategy and Architecture
