Banking

Stella took a deep breath.

Stella had just deployed a next-gen chatbot solution on her bank’s website four weeks ago. She was promoted to VP of Customer Experience a few months ago – this was her first salvo at improving the bank’s NPS scores for customer interaction. She was getting great inbound leads, but their internal review, onboarding, and first 30-day experience had been a letdown, with the bank’s internal processes struggling to keep up with demand.

She realized a little too late that it would take an entire rehaul of the bank’s customer-facing platform engine, not just the facade at the first customer interaction.

Does this sound all too familiar to you? Stella’s struggles and pain areas are relatable for anyone who handles customer experience at large banking organizations. Mapping compelling customer experiences on existing banking journeys is always a mammoth undertaking at venerable banking companies. This lack of end-to-end agility in fulfilling customer interactions has now become an existential threat to such banks in the last few years, with smaller fintech companies and online-first banks offering a white-glove customer experience to their customers.

Companies like Betterment and Simple provide great ways to meet them wherever their customers are. They also preempt key pain areas by providing step-by-step guidance on meeting essential milestones in their customer’s lives. Established digital banking platforms with an aging infrastructure did not have too many options to leapfrog their technology to match the prowess of these digital-first fintech providers, until recently.

Autonom8 is here to help. We can set a strong foundation for your bank to change the way you interact with your customers.

A digital customer journey is a visual representation of all the interactions a customer has with the business to achieve a particular objective. In this case, customers would be going through two or more steps to successfully apply for a personal loan or housing mortgage from a banking institution.

Loan or Mortgage Origination

Customers are either contacted by an outbound marketing team from the bank to enquire for loan requirements OR they could be interested in a particular banking service specific to their mortgage requirements and might approach them through traditional channels like web/phone/email.

Document Submission

Upon successful qualification based on preliminary queries, the customer submits the necessary identity and financial documents through online submission or through a collection agent, who routes the documents to the bank, then forwards it to a credit review team.

Credit Review

The customer then awaits feedback and approval from the bank via the credit review team, which carefully verifies the paperwork to determine eligibility limits and creditworthiness of the individual seeking the loan.

Account creation and onboarding

On successful approval, customers get an authorized letter with detailed APR and mortgage closing instructions. They can now proceed to fill the necessary closing paperwork to fulfill home buying formalities. On completion, they are provided with access instructions to review their loan details online.

Post disbursal support

Once the mortgage amount is successfully disbursed, the monthly EMI schedule terms kick in, and the customer is notified about the payment schedule. They can contact the bank for supporting documentation like tax certificates or adjustable-rate updates through available channels like email/phone/online chat.

If we try to understand how such customer journeys are delivered to the customer, we realize that a lot goes on behind the scenes in any digital banking platform to fulfill all these customer interactions. Each customer touchpoint requires coordination between various teams such as marketing, sales, legal, and customer success, which needs to be executed with efficiency. This is where a service blueprint kicks in: it is a detailed map of all these back-office processes between different teams, making the frontline customer experience possible.

But manual intervention and traditional ways of executing this service blueprint would restrict the agility to scale and respond to changing marketing conditions. Although deploying new-age frontline capabilities like chatbots would lure in curious visitors to the banking website, the inability to seamlessly connect all underlying processes to fulfill a mortgage application can make or irreparably break the customer’s perception of the bank.

Loan or Mortgage Origination

Marketing and sales teams need to coordinate effectively to nurture enough information about the customer to determine qualifying leads to feed into the origination process. Depending on the organization structure, lack of efficiency in the data flow between these teams could lead to loss of opportunities to serve more qualifying customers.

Document Submission

Customer documentation for determining eligibility and creditworthiness could lead to a lot of back and forth between the sales and credit risk evaluation teams, depending on the mortgage requirements. Most banks also work with a lot of ad-hoc channels to collate documents between agents and online channels, often because of lack of a streamlined approach to securely collect, review, and parse document submissions.

Credit Review

Pinpointing anomalies in creditworthiness and property title verification could be a cumbersome manual process, depending on the state and location. These inefficiencies in automating the evaluation workflows could add to cycle times for review and approval of mortgage applications at scale.

Account creation and onboarding

Account creation, disbursal, and onboarding process is usually a hi-touch experience, which could lead to many gaps in the overall closing process. Banks typically expect customers to fill out forms to provide access, which could be easily alleviated by connecting the documentation workflows to the account onboarding processes.

Post disbursal support

Customers are always looking out for options to refinance and get a better rate in their mortgage. Such opportunities are typically acted upon only when customers approach the bank for a loan transfer or re-negotiation request. Such scenarios could easily be preempted by tapping into customer insights based on their relationship with the bank.

All these gaps and inefficiencies in the customer’s digital banking journey (and consequently the service blueprint) need to be improved upon expeditiously to scale up the bank’s capabilities to provide a white glove experience, like their digital-first competitors. But attempting to transform their digital prowess behind the scenes on their own could take them years to come toat par with the tech-savvy competition. They need to find ways to scale at demand with cutting-edge insights and tech automation capabilities, without losing too much time at hand.

This part is where companies offering Customer-Journey-as-a-Service (CJaaS) capabilities come to their rescue.

The status quo is that a set of technology providers would enable chatbot platforms for customer interactions. In contrast, a different category of technology companies might provide a way to improve workflows, and yet another breed might provide data insights into existing business processes. All three categories might have their proprietary platforms, which might not talk to each other. Such a disparate set of platforms creates their own set of inefficiencies to deal with, when banks attempt to get these systems to work seamlessly with their legacy infrastructure.

Autonom8 provides all the capabilities under one roof. Banks need not shop around to plug in chatbot capabilities, automated workflows, and data insights from different technology vendors into their existing customer journeys. Autonom8 offers seamless orchestration to bind and enable these customer journeys across its suite of products.

Let us go through the same steps to see the differentiated benefits that only an integrated platform like Autonom8 can offer, to make a compelling digital banking experience throughout the mortgage journey.

Loan or Mortgage Origination

Marketing and Sales teams could now leverage the same process to generate leads across all channels. A8Chat works on the web and mobile, but it can also work across most popular messaging channels like WhatsApp and FB messenger. Such cross-platform capabilities mean banks could now reach out to customers wherever they are.

A8Chat provides a way for customers to quickly lookup all available product offerings and provide them with an automated approach to provide preliminary information. It could then route only specific chat workflows to the marketing and sales team, which might require human intervention.

A8Chat in action for a chat workflow

Document Submission

A8Chat is not only a conversational chatbot platform – when combined with A8Flow, it becomes an integrated document scanning and secure solution for image recognition. It can detect the content type and match patterns to diagnose missing or incorrect information in documents while masking sensitive information. All preliminary checks to process paperwork can be done in real-time with accurate results, thus reducing the cycle time to review document collection.

A8Flow for a document scanning workflow

Credit Review

A8Flow provides an exhaustive credit score modeling capability, which would enable predicting creditworthiness by evaluating account and spend history from a variety of sources and arrive at an informed estimate for mortgage eligibility. It also minimizes the need to coordinate offline between various legal and compliance teams for field visits and 3rd party investigations for title search by providing a dashboard that informs all teams on the next steps in the application process.

Combined with A8iQ, the Autonom8 platform provides best-in-class fraud detection and diagnosis capabilities, by automatically matching mortgage application patterns at scale to flag abnormal patterns and surfacing them proactively on the platform.

A8iQ in action for pattern detection

Account creation and onboarding

A8Chat and A8Flow can allow agents to manage multiple accounts from the dashboard, which gives account agents a single consolidated view of where their customers are at each stage in the mortgage process. It also allows agents to provide customer-friendly options to utilities like APR or mortgage payment information and securely authenticate enquiring customers to serve them immediately without having them download apps or visit a website to access account information.

A8Flow dashboard

Post disbursal support

A8Chat allows proactive customer support by assisting customers 24/7 not just on transactional inquiries but also on reviewing monthly and annual tax reporting. Combined with A8iQ, it can proactively look for spend patterns and nudge customers by offering personalized options for adjacent products provided by the bank, without having to wait for an agent to initiate the conversation.

A8Chat in action for a support workflow