The Employee Side of Digital Banking: Administrative Tools You Need to Easily and Effectively Manage your Digital Banking Platform
Launching a new digital banking solution is an exciting event for banks and credit unions, and something that is often the result of several hundred hours of effort across various departments within the financial institution, as well as multiple third-party vendors. However, this isn’t the end of the journey, it’s just the beginning!
What’s even more important now is for employees to start servicing and communicating with their end users in a seamless way. As customers and members start using their new digital banking applications, there will be inquiries about user experience, functionality, flows, as well as increased attention from fraudsters. This is where the banks and credit unions need powerful administrative and back-office tools to help deliver outstanding customer and member service, as well as ensure a secure browsing experience for their account holders.
Employee user experience: The first step to delivering great customer service is to make sure your frontline staff knows how to navigate the new application, as well as allow them to answer users’ questions and service their requests quickly. Employee user experience is not just about providing a good-looking web interface, but equally important is the need to train them on using all the administrative tools and to give them sufficient time to familiarize themselves with the end user applications. Financial institutions need happy frontline employees that in-turn help retain account holders. The correlation between happy employees and customer or member satisfaction cannot be overstated. According to a recent Harvard Business Review study, each one-star improvement in a company’s employee rating corresponds to a 1.3-point out of 100 improvement in customer satisfaction score1.
Tools to educate and interact with account holders: When you introduce a new digital banking application, customers and members will have a lot of questions until they learn how to navigate through the screens. For this reason, it is important for financial institutions to provide employees easy access to account holder data, allow them to view actions performed by their members or customers, perform actions on their behalf as needed, send broadcasts and notifications, and even communicate with the end user in real-time, if required. Additionally, the digital banking administrative application is often the heart of a financial institution’s complex digital ecosystem and interacts with several other third-party systems, including the core banking system. As these third-party vendors launch new versions or introduce changes, staff needs the ability to easily configure the look-and-feel, content, and behavior of the end user applications – to help ensure a smooth user experience for their account holders.
Security and fraud prevention: Digital banking solutions must include a range of administrative tools that allow the staff to monitor user accounts proactively, introduce and change password rules if needed, update user data on behalf of the end users, and even prevent access to certain digital banking features if needed, to cut losses. With the constant rise in identity theft and data privacy violations, banks and credit unions must double-down on providing these types of tools to prevent fraud, as well as equip frontline staff with the ability to respond to, and minimize the impact of, any losses incurred due to security incidents.
Reporting and analytics: Financial institutions are no different than organizations in other industries. Every interaction – both from within the branch or remote - provides a bank or credit union with actionable and insightful data, including user behavior and trends. With many customers and members transacting online and digitally today, through smartphones or computers, the importance of understanding these patterns, in connection to their personal financial stories and use journeys, becomes even more critical, so that the same quality of data can be captured remotely as in traditional face-to-face engagements. Leveraging real-time data analytics and reporting tools is imperative for employees to unlock this information from within online and digital channels. In fact, a survey by McKinsey & Company found that many financial institutions list “advanced analytics” among their top five priorities, with those who have invested in such technologies already seeing the rewards. Those banks and credit unions that employ a data analytics solution in parallel to their digital banking platform deliver a truly seamless multichannel experience with a consistent user journey across all devices and points of engagement. By gathering real-time data with every click and swipe, and in connection to their account holders’ life events and financial stories, institutions gain a better understanding of their customers and members. Banks and credit unions can then access these insights through role and permission-based visual dashboards and reports and make them actionable.
The digital banking space is rapidly evolving, and if the past decade is any indication, may look vastly different in the next five years. However, what remains constant is the need to keep customers and members happy. With the advent of new players such as OpenAI, technologies such as ChatGPT, we expect to see several institutions adopting AI-based customer or member service tools for self-service and to reduce inquiries. Despite these new capabilities, the need for human employees to support account holders and address their more complex questions and requests remains prevalent. Providing a high-level of customer service is only possible if the staff is equipped with the right set of administrative account, security, and analysis tools.
NXT, Alogent’s online, mobile and digital banking platform, offers a powerful set of such back-office tools including an administrative console for bank and credit union employees. With a focus on the user journey and overall banking experience, our digital banking team leverages the expertise and support of our UI/UX experts to create a cohesive, digital ecosystem with data-backed capabilities. Its API-driven platform and open architecture offers hundreds of pre-built configurations to third party capabilities, as well as a software toolkit (SDK) to meet the unique goals of your financial institution.
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1 https://hbr.org/2019/08/the-key-to-happy-customers-happy-employees