Insights: The three elements of a successful digital banking strategy

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a lasting impact on how clients interact with their banks and hastened the transition to digital banking services. Today, online banking services are the norm and customers are increasingly using digital banking services to transfer money and pay for e-commerce purchases. According to a recent survey by Entrust, nearly 77 per cent of consumers in Saudi Arabia and 61 per cent in the UAE – the Arab world’s two largest economies – prefer digital banking.

Instantaneous and on-demand responses are high on the consumer’s wish list. As a result, many banking customers are using chat, text, messaging apps, or email instead of calling a phone number or visiting their local branch.

It follows that most customers expect a consistent experience across all platforms when conducting any banking transactions. This means they may initiate a dialogue using one channel, such as webchat, and then follow up with a phone call or email, expecting their bank to keep track of the previous interaction. Instead of starting from scratch with each stage, the bank’s customer experience team must have insight into what has already been discussed or agreed upon, as well as the immediate next steps to be taken.

While omnichannel and digital services aren’t new to banks, many institutions have struggled to keep up with the rapid changes and the scale of demand during the pandemic. Haphazard technology deployments have created siloed user experiences across voice and digital interactions. Larger banks have also faced the problem of offering a consistent consumer experience across all business lines and geographical locations. This underscores the need to develop a comprehensive digital strategy. Banks must adapt to client needs and deliver meaningful and personalised customer experiences if they want to establish long-lasting relationships and loyalty in the communities they serve.

As such, there are three critical elements for maximising success when implementing a digital banking strategy:

1. Putting the customer at the heart of digital transformation
When deploying a digital strategy, simply implementing new channels is a problematic approach – this process requires a different mindset. New digital deployments frequently fail when the design derives from an organisation’s internal goals instead of their customers’ expectations. Using customer-centric design techniques places users at the heart of transformation, enabling banks to focus on delivering smooth and consistent customer experiences across channels.

By leveraging cloud technology, banks can implement a digital engagement solution that reimagines the experience and requirements of clients and employees throughout their journeys, thereby enabling them to replace disparate technologies with scalable solutions.

2. Elevating experiences with cloud
After determining which digital engagement techniques customers prefer, banks must ensure they can meet that demand. Clients and customers have grown accustomed to digital channels with features such as rapid pay, quick deposits, and self-service trading that can be accessed anywhere and at any time. Demand for these features and other digital capabilities will continue to rise, and banks must ensure that they are prepared to respond.

By utilising cloud technology, banks can enhance their services in response to demand while improving agility and speed. This ensures that customer concerns can be addressed quickly and efficiently. Simultaneously, this enables banks to respond more quickly to their client’s changing needs by providing a consistent, simple, and accessible experience across all channels.

By determining which digital engagement methods are most important to customers and bringing capabilities up to speed with demand, banks can lay the groundwork for their digital strategy. They can then develop experiences tailored to their client’s needs.

3. Creating personalised experiences with predictive AI
Once customers’ preferred journeys have been determined, the next stage in developing a comprehensive digital strategy is to enable predictive engagement utilizing artificial intelligence (AI). AI-based predictive routing employs predictive capabilities to comprehend intent, redirects to the next optimal step in the journey, and enables agents to respond with the knowledge needed to drive meaningful outcomes.

By providing a fully personalised experience, banks can ensure customers feel heard and understood and that their concerns are addressed with empathy.

Investing in the digital future
To build and nurture their customer base, regional banks are actively investing in digital capabilities. In this arena, cloud solutions are a crucial facilitator, as they enable banks to transform and experiment with digital innovations, allowing new deployments to be tried and tested before being used for the long term. This gives banks the flexibility and agility to develop new services and apps in the future, allowing them to respond and adapt to client needs with ease.

As customer expectations continue to evolve, banks need to utilise the right technology and establish a robust cloud-based digital banking strategy to ensure that their customers consistently receive exceptional experiences.

Amr AlMasri is the regional director at Genesys – Middle East

Read: Banking-as-a-service is transforming the future of financial services