by Ankur Rawat, Director of Banking Products and Solutions at Newgen

It is no secret that trust is one of the pillars of customer relationships for organizations.

But, how critical is it?

According to a recent Deloitte Digital survey[1], while rational factors play a key role at the beginning and end of relationships, it is the emotional factors that inspire brand loyalty. 60 percent of long-term customers use emotional language to describe their connection to their favored brands. And, among the emotional factors that consumers feel most aligned with their favorite brands, trustworthiness (83%), integrity (79%), and honesty (77%) form the top three.

For financial institutions, this isn’t a surprise. After all, your customers entrust you with their financial assets, and not just their personal information.

If anything, building trust is becoming even more critical amidst increasingly digital (and even more demanding) customer behavior and tightening regulatory regimes.

Technology as the double-edged sword

One would think that technology, with all the advancements in digital, would enable financial institutions to build better trust mechanisms. While that is true, the same technologies that drive digital can also cause a trust deficit.

This happens due to the increasing reliance on technology and fading human touch. While technologies (mobility, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, for instance) ease and speed up transactions, when used in isolation, they often do not guarantee frictionless customer engagement.

Take mobile-based loan applications, for instance. Long application forms or cumbersome document upload cause unease up-front. That unease can quickly translate to mistrust in the minds of customers when the status of sensitive documents is not easily available to them, or they are asked to resubmit the same in person for reasons vague to them.

Moreover, the disjointed processes–caused by the underlying silos that persist despite technological advancements–further dent your efforts in building trust with customers.

This disjointedness becomes apparent when customers cannot seamlessly resume their loan application from another medium or device later, at a more convenient time. Customers feel further alienated when relationship managers and customer support executives cannot securely access all the relevant collaterals instantly when approached for any clarifications.

So, contrary to the common perception that digital trust is about security and privacy, it is more about incrementally building trust at every step of your engagements with customers and preventing incidents that could dent it; Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all!

Building digital trust (using technologies the right way)

There must be more to it. After all, organizations like yours have been striving to do just that with digital technologies – to deliver customer experience and delightful engagements. However, what’s happening is that while transactions get faster, the processes could still be disjointed; And while responses are quicker, the context could still be missing; And while email/text updates and push notifications are sent out, they may not be timely or consistent or relevant.

Building digital trust involves asking the following questions and finding a holistic solution that addresses these in a unified manner.

Building Digital Trust

Building transparency (including accessibility and visibility)  --  Can your customers see everything they need to?

Building responsiveness   --  Can they trust you to respect their time?

Building credibility  --  Can they trust you to deliver on your commitments?

Building trustworthiness   --  Can they trust you with their assets and information?

Building predictability   --  Can they expect consistency from you?

Your secret sauce for building digital trust lies in addressing those blind spots through the appropriate usage of digital technologies. Let’s see how.

1.      Automate your processes to tie the end-to-end customer journey

Your customers, employees, and partners expect visibility into the end-to-end journey. Not only that, they also expect you to be in control of the process from start to end, including handling of unforeseen circumstances and exceptions, with minimal human intervention and zero delays.

You can accomplish this through process automation, combined with advanced decision-making mechanisms, such as business rules and AI. You can further achieve straight-through processing through integration of your backend systems and judicious use of robotic process automation. Process automation goes a long way in building trust as your management as well as your customers have real-time visibility, supported by SLA-driven process execution.

As a result, your customers get onboarded in real time and status of their service requests, such as loan foreclosure, or credit line extension is available to them with precision, including what can be expected next. Common exceptions are handled real-time through automation. In case of unforeseen scenarios, your employees are empowered to intervene in timely manner with authority and information to make smart decisions.

2.      Contextualize your engagements at every touchpoint

While most organizations are focused on handling data, and rightly so, a lot of unstructured information (in the form of documents–digital as well as physical, media files, emails, and social media messages) remains inadequately addressed. At every touchpoint, secure and authorized access to these documents while ensuring privacy can not only reduce friction in the processes but also help assure your customers that they are in good hands.

The traditional ways of handling documents and information fall short of this demand. A modern way to manage content through contextual content services, with the ability to integrate with the process platform as well as your channels and systems through web services, goes a long way in ensuring seamless, contextual engagement.

Consequently, your customers can upload all documents securely (while applying for loans or mortgage, for instance) regardless of device. What’s more, automated document processing drastically reduced data entry, while assuring customers of security with masking of sensitive information. Availability of relevant documents in real-time helps your employees speed up the process, thereby improving responsiveness as well as predictability of your operations.

3.      Build omnichannel and cross-channel processes

The basic premise of mobile and social technologies has been to ensure a seamless interface into your business processes and deliver anytime, anywhere paradigm to your customers, employees, and partners. Unfortunately, organizations still struggle to ensure consistency and continuity across channels and devices, leading to frustration and trust deficit.

Your customers must be able to initiate transactions from any channel or device (say, a mobile through a social media message), switch to another device (say a tablet), midway through the process, and be able to engage with you and receive updates and notifications on any channel or device of preference, anytime and anywhere. They should be able to do that across transactions and touch points, whether it is a simple service request, renewal reminders, billing notifications, or a complex mortgage or loan application.

It is unrealistic to build such mechanisms for processes across business units and locations separately. The only way you can achieve this enterprise-wide is through an omnichannel customer engagement platform that can integrate with all your incoming and outgoing channels as well as processes, thereby ensuring that all communication is timely, consistent, and contextually relevant, without anything falling through the cracks.

Building digital trust is a (transformational) journey

Like with every transformational initiative, deploying a platform that enables process automation, content management, and customer engagement, is only a step in the journey. It is critical for you to plan judiciously and establish a roadmap for the implementation of your customer-centric processes.

A well-planned and integrated platform that holistically addresses the end-to-end customer journey also enables you with strategic agility when powered by low code. This becomes even more critical, because in the rapidly changing banking paradigm, building digital trust is not a one-time act but an ongoing transformational journey.

[1] Exploring the value of emotion-driven engagement: The dynamics of customer loyalty, Deloitte Digital