Retail banks strive to enhance sales and service by reducing customer wait times, matching staff expertise to customer needs, and delivering information to multiple channels (including branch, web, phone, ATM, and kiosk). Achieving this means properly educating internal staff on how to collaborate more easily and effectively to quickly resolve customer issues, and dynamically respond to sales opportunities. This works best when retail banks balance their focus on increasing revenues with reducing operational expenses and risks as a means of reaching their ultimate goal sustainable, profitable growth.
The role of IT in this effort centers on defining technology architectures that:
- Integrate disparate areas of customer-related information
- Maximize internal employee effectiveness
- Minimize security risks
Creating the Customer-Centric Infrastructure
Retail banks deploy a diverse set of custom-built applications that perform designated functions - from online customer account access to in-branch services (such as electronic check processing). Retail banks can get closer to their customers, and better manage costs, through a common, customer-centric architectural approach.
Using common infrastructure services to replace or enhance custom-built application functionality is a proven strategy for cost-effective development and deployment. This allows for:
- Greater standardization
- Centralization
- Control over the application environment
- Efficient development of new capabilities and integrations
Cisco Collaborative Customer Experience (CCE) solutions for the financial services industry demonstrate how this approach can be used to drive development efficiency, reduce operating costs, and help mitigate risks to support sustainable, profitable growth.
