OREANDA-NEWS. August 08, 2016. “Today’s millennial customers are quite demanding and favor a certain level of empowerment in servicing their needs on their own,” says Jaideep Poondir. “In financial services, the convenience of anytime, anywhere banking for customers has underpinned the need for self-service offerings. Moreover, today’s digital customers are also open to the idea of conducting complex tasks such as managing their investments using robo-advisors instead of in-person advisors.” Excerpts:

“Flourishing digital channels have played the perfect catalyst in realizing these self-service aspirations so far. Consequently, we see that banks are rapidly shrinking their branch footprint as more and more customers switch to digital self-service channels. As the FinTech disruption continues to magnify, banks are increasingly feeling the urge to be truly digital.

Cost reduction has also featured consistently as one of the top priorities on the agenda of banks. Banks have turned to automation in addressing the dual mandate of cost-efficiencies and digital innovation. This demand for automation to empower customers is driving the self-service technology market and it is only going to get stronger as it is a win-win proposition for banks as well as customers. Self-service is poised to become key in the future of customer servicing.

The more organizations focus on migrating transactional activities to self-service channels, the more they stand to gain from low cost of servicing and improved customer loyalty.

It is important for financial services firms to have mobile experience at the core of their human design experience strategy. It doesn’t imply though, that the other channels can be ignored. So firms need to take a holistic approach towards designing all of their customer-facing processes. Having an omni-channel strategy, which focuses on all experiences ? online (desktop and mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and smartwatches), offline (branches, call centers, and so on) and other channels (TV, radio, mails, and so on) ? will be key to customer acquisition and retention.

ATMs, IVRs, self-service kiosks, online banking and mobile banking apps have played an important role in cultivating the self-service culture among financial services customers. As these technologies continue to mature, incremental enhancements within the existing offerings and new offerings based on technologies such as artificial intelligence will need to be explored.

Also, as self-service emerges as the most common method of banking, financial services firms will have to focus on pre-empting client needs to serve them better. Banks will have to augment the current self-service channels to develop revenue- and value-generating opportunities. The emphasis should be on using self-service channels not just for conducting a basic transaction, but also for generating cross-sell opportunities.”