Financial organizations must reckon with how they should leverage digital transformation technologies to keep pace with customer experience expectations.
Customer behavior and expectations are changing across industries. Following the rise of omnichannel communication and interaction through digital platforms in the last two years, 75% of customers report trying new shopping behaviors, and 71% expect to be met with seamless digital service and personalized touches. Among enterprise CEOs, 53% now view the quality of digital customer experiences as the primary competitive differentiator in their fields.
New challenges in adapting to an increasingly digital world have begun to affect even the traditionally change-adverse financial services industry. Going forward, financial organizations must reckon with the question of how they should leverage digital transformation in order to keep pace with ever-evolving customer experience expectations.
Digital transformation refers to incorporating digital and computer-based technologies into an organization's operations, processes, and strategies. As all human activities and interactions – and not just in commerce – come to increasingly rely upon digital devices and internet technologies, organizations are pursuing digital transformation to better engage with their customers and enable their workforces to provide cutting-edge services.
Digital transformation occurs at different scales in different industries. Yet, for many, it requires a redesign of workflows, supply chains, and channels of interaction within and outside organizations. The successful adoption of digital transformation technology should always drive increases in customer satisfaction. The bottom line is that decision-makers should evaluate and adopt new digital technologies with improved business operations – and thus their measurable KPIs – in mind.
For the financial industry – commercial lending in particular – five potential benefits from digital transformation stand out as a foundation for new technology initiatives.
Client onboarding is crucial when it comes to making first impressions. Nearly two-thirds of customers – 63% – take the overall onboarding experience into account when choosing a service provider, and 87% expect businesses to deliver more in this department. Digitizing the rote tasks of collecting client information and documents can help organizations deliver stronger first impressions in this critical phase.
Making client onboarding processes available through client portals outfitted with checklists and automated reminders can streamline the process for everyone involved.
Read the blog post: Paperless Client Onboarding: Why use document portal software?
Recent studies show that for 86% of white-collar knowledge workers, process automation could effectively handle half of their workloads. Commercial lending processes, in particular, are rife with manual, rote tasks such as redundant data entry. Altogether these tasks consume as much as 30-40% of lending staff time.
With organizations of over 100 employees now relying on an average of 150 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications – most of which are unintegrated – smart workflow solutions depend on making information available to users in one place and eliminating redundant data entry to speed up workflows through process automation.
For commercial lenders, the documents collection phase of loan applications has become a notorious bottleneck in the loan approval process, with downtime for loan officers waiting for client documents accounting for as much as 40% of the sales cycle. Digital solutions for this problem involve bringing document collection online through secure file sharing services and client portals. With configurable notifications for clients and loan officers, automated document collection platforms can significantly reduce downtime, creating more satisfied clients and more efficient lending teams.
While digital transformation has given customers an abundance of new channels of communication with businesses – text, email, chat apps, and various social media platforms – it has also complicated reconstructing the whole correspondence with a particular customer and keeping tabs on the status of communications scattered across dozens of channels.
Reconsolidating this mess means adopting a unified platform capable of integrating different communication channels and easing the manual follow-up burden through automation. In a unified platform, clients and lending staff benefit from access to a complete record of all relevant communications in one place.
Organizations that continue to rely on mismatched document collection and communication processes through hard copies, email, and phones expose themselves to unnecessary and rising risks. In the last 12 months, 93% of organizations using these processes have experienced a data breach involving sensitive client data.
With data breaches on the rise and increased data privacy regulations likely in the pipeline, organizations should make hardening their information security postures a key component of digital transformation initiatives. In practice, this means working with SaaS and cloud service providers who offer the best data handling technologies such as 256-bit encryption and maintaining third-party security credentials such as Service Organization Controls (SOC).
FileInvite’s SOC 2 Type 2 compliant document collection platform can cut turnaround times by as much as 80%. With secure client portals and end-to-end encrypted file sharing, FileInvite enables clients and lending staff to have live visibility into the loan application process.
To learn more and request a demo, visit FileInvite today.
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