Three Steps to Building a Post-Pandemic Payments Strategy

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The Covid-19 pandemic spotlighted contactless payments. To stay competitive with the future of payments, community banks must offer multifaceted options, like virtual cards, P2P payments and digital wallets.

But building a digital and contactless payments strategy goes beyond just offering digital wallets — though that can be a key tool. To become their customers’ primary transactional relationship, community banks need a strategy to make credit and debit payments easy in any digital channel.

Digital banking and contactless payment adoption accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. A Mastercard survey conducted last year found that contactless transactions grew twice as fast as traditional checkout methods at grocery and drug stores between February and March. Additionally, Juniper Research found that spend in digital wallets is projected to increase 83% by 2025 due to adoption of digital payments during the pandemic. Three key steps for community banks looking to construct a card strategy are to audit your payments capabilities and gaps, use digital to become the passive provider of choice and diversify your card and payment portfolio.

Audit Payments Capabilities, Gaps
Before bank leaders can roll out new card programs, they must evaluate where their bank’s existing programs are and if any service gaps exist. Common questions every manager should evaluate are:

  • How much revenue is the current card program driving, and is it increasing or decreasing?
  • What is the wallet share of the bank’s current cards and is it increasing or decreasing?
  • Who are customers using to make payments outside your network?
  • What payment options can you support? Options should encompass virtual cards, P2P payments, purpose-driven cards that are targeted to specific audiences and needs and digital wallets.

From here, bank leaders can figure out where their greatest opportunities lie. It might be in building a set of niche card programs to meet a specific need, such as teen card accounts, gig worker cards or a virtual card offering. It could also be expanding card options to include prepaid programs, bringing debit cards in-house or adding card controls to enhance the customer experience.

Become the “Passive Payment” Provider of Choice
Once bank leaders understand their opportunities, they need to build strategies that help their cards become the “passive payment” provider of choice. Taking security as a given, customers care most about convenience. They will use the payment option that is the easiest for their chosen channel of commerce.

Digital wallets and contactless are becoming table stakes for banks; they are no longer “nice-to-have” products that will differentiate your institution from your competitors. The rise in e-commerce means that banks must make it easy for their customers to fulfill those purchases with their preferred payment option virtually.

Additionally, customers are increasingly demanding instant access to new accounts. Instant digital card issuance enables customers to issue or reissue a credit or debit card digitally and on demand for immediate use.

Banks should also work to ensure that their cards are able to integrate with existing digital wallets, allowing customers to “push-provision” their cards into their preferred wallet or app, rather than manually entering their card information.

Diversify the Card, Payment Portfolio
A diverse payments strategy is more than just offering a general-purpose debit or credit card. People increasingly want purpose-driven cards that meet their specific needs and situations. Families love accounts that provide the parents control over funds while giving their teens the ability to learn how to manage their money and spend with some autonomy. A dedicated business card can make paying vendors and other bills easy to manage without staff in the office to run a traditional accounts payable team. In addition, many businesses want “team” or “disbursement” cards they can issue to employees and monitor the transactions in real-time while retaining some control over how the funds are spent. The combinations are endless — elderly care accounts, affiliations with membership organizations and gig worker cards are other popular options.

To determine which products a community bank should focus on, leaders need to analyze customers’ spending behaviors by channel, using transaction data to look for trends. Then, they can build campaigns to target the most profitable or most engaged customers.

The additional revenue sources will be vital to community banks’ survival, given continually low interest rates. By building a comprehensive digital, contactless and physical card payments strategy, institutions can positioned themselves to remain the bank of choice for their communities.

Notching Customer, Employee Wins Through Process Automation

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Financial institutions are committed to improving digital banking services and enabled more digital capabilities over the past year out of necessity — but there is more transformation to be done.

In their haste to meet customers’ and employees’ needs, many banks overlooked opportunities in back-office processes that are critical to providing excellent customer service, such as operating an efficient Regulation E (Reg E) dispute tracking process along with other processes that can ease employee challenges with regulatory compliance issues.

To enable bank staff to better serve customers, financial institutions must automate their back-office dispute tracking processes. One way to do is through implementing process automation solutions that offer workflows to direct the disputes appropriately, a single storage location for all supporting documentation and automating mundane tasks, such as generating letters and updating general ledger accounts. Implementing this kind of automation enables banks to simplify and streamline their input of disputes, ensuring that all critical information is captured accurately and dispute intake is handled consistently. This allows banks to provide consistent engagement and faster response to their customers.

Back-office automation strengthens a bank’s regulatory compliance and customer engagement. Awaiting outcomes from back-office processes can be extremely frustrating to customers — these moments are often tied to high-stress situations, such as having their cards used fraudulently. Banks should consider how manual, error-prone dispute tracking processes negatively affect the customer experience. Institutions also gain the crucial visibility that supports their decision-making and improves compliance with regulations, mitigating the risk and cost of non-compliance.

Process automation can also eliminate the stress that impacts account holders during this process. Having back-office automation with enhanced workflows and centralized documentation allows banks to return provisional credit more quickly and minimizes errors and delays. Instead of missing deadlines and making mistakes that erode customer confidence and cause audit exceptions, back-office employees meet deadlines and process disputes consistently and accurately, avoiding fines and additional work to remedy errors.

Automation can also improve back-office productivity by enhancing visibility. Clear visibility is created when a back-office employee can immediately track documentation and data when it is needed, at any stage in the process. During an audit, an employee may need to retrieve the date that a customer filed a Reg E dispute or to prove proper credit was applied. Without the appropriate tools, such as a single dashboard for dispute tracking and one platform for all supporting documentation, employees waste time searching paper files, spreadsheets and emails to piece together the required information. A workflow automation platform means a full audit trail with supporting documentation is readily available, optimizing everyone’s time.

For example, automation at Watkinsville, Georgia-based Oconee State Bank enables employees to efficiently complete tasks and focus their attention on serving their customers without being slowed down by complicated processes. The bank reduced the amount of time it took to file consumer disputes by more than 80% through process automation.

With 12 branches across Illinois and Indiana, First Bank, based in Carmi, Illinois, reduced claim processing time by more than 50% and experienced positive impacts from its digital dispute process. Dispute processes that can be easily tracked enable bank executives to clear audits and gain greater visibility into risk and compliance across their institution.

The visibility banks gain through automation improves their decision-making. Hard-to-access information and lack of visibility can be especially defeating when managing risk and compliance. Not only does incorrect or unavailable information open the door for human error, but it can also lead to financial loss. In areas like Reg E dispute tracking, this financial loss can be a result of not identifying a fraudulent dispute or trends of fraudulent charges. Process automation helps by supporting a methodical approach to reducing fraud and increasing visibility of high-risk merchants and customers.

This kind of attentive review during the Reg E process can help banks reduce the amount of undetected fraud and lower their write-off threshold, which is the pre-established amount set by an individual financial institution, under which any dispute is automatically written off as a financial loss. These thresholds are traditionally set with the back office staff’s bandwidth in mind; with more free time, banks can lower this threshold and avoid automatic losses. For instance, after implementing an automated, Reg E dispute tracking solution, Happy State Bank, the bank unit of Canyon, Texas-based Happy Bancshares, was able to lower its write-off threshold from $100 to $50 per dispute.

Tackling process automation can help banks compete and win while improving the level of service provided to customers. This technology empowers staff to be more responsive and alert to trends, enabling better decision-making and saving both cost and time. Implementing process automation allows banks to differentiate themselves from their competitors by providing consistent engagement and faster responses to customers. Process automation is the key to optimizing efficiency within any financial institution.

Small Business Checking, Repositioned

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This is part two of a two-part post diving into the future of small business checking. Read part one, Small Business Checking, Reimagined.

Increasingly, small businesses see digital payment solutions as both a way to get paid faster and to satisfy customers who now prefer to pay that way. Indeed, this capability has become indispensable for most small businesses. And for banks, it is the key to capturing even more small and medium-sized business relationships moving forward.

However, there is one problem: Banks don’t offer a simple solution to help their small business customers meet this fundamental need. As a result, small business owners have had to resort to outside options (four of which we explored in part one). Over time, this reliance on fintech challengers can lead to disintermediation for the bank, as the non-banks begin to replace the financial institution with their own offerings.

At this point you may be wondering: Does my bank already offer this kind of solution, or something that’s similar enough? The answer, most likely, is no — or not yet.

The reality is that the ideal solution for a small business owner is a steep change from the small business accounts of today. Current accounts are built on transactional functionality. The many supporting, and sometimes dizzying, features that go along with it, such as transaction fees, minimum balances and item allowances, may be important to the bank, but miss the mark for a small business.

Simply put, small business owners need bank accounts designed for a very specific reason: to receive digital payments and easily track their critical cash flow in the process.

To be truly relevant, this reimagined small business checking account needs to include the following three crucial components:

  • Digital payment acceptance, including credit cards, and online invoicing, set up and ready for the small business owner to start getting paid faster into the very same account.
  • Manage and track customer payments, ranging from incoming, coming due, and past due, right inside the digital platform that’s comprises their checking account.
  • Expertise and high-touch support that a business owner can expect from a longstanding and trustworthy institution. This is an important differentiator, and one that fintech challengers can’t come close to matching.

This checking account product offers two significant benefits. For a small business owner, it represents exactly what they have been searching for: a complete small business solution that features receivables functionality, offered by the same trusted institution that they’ve come to rely on for so many other needs.

And for banks, this new account allows them to embrace a mindset focused on customer workflows and solving real-world challenges. It could even signal a way forward, and open the door to many more opportunities. Promoting such a markedly different product, however, would require some care. Unlike a typical account, with its mandatory list of bulleted features, a reimagined solution like this one requires positioning that highlights its problem-solving capabilities.

A generic framework for our hypothetical account, organized by customer need first and benefit(s) second, could go:

Get paid, the way they want to pay
Make it easy for paying customers. Accept online payments and credit cards, or send personalized digital invoices. Either way, get paid directly into your bank account for easy access to funds.

Better control of your cash flow
Track and manage it all automatically: incoming, coming due and past due customer payments. Know exactly who has paid and when, and get an up-to-date view of your cash flow.

Do it all, all in one place
More than a checking account. Everything you need for your small business is included with your account. And there’s no need to set up multiple accounts across multiple platforms — one easy enrollment is all you need.

You don’t have to go it alone
Because a great digital experience is only the beginning. Every successful business needs an accessible financial partner — your bank is available and ready to help.

Of course, a reimagined small business checking account needs to be designed and launched with supporting capabilities in mind. Look for partners that can help your institution go to market with a proven solution — inclusive of the product capabilities and go-to-market services — that enable small business owners to get paid, while staying ahead of the competition.

Learn more about Autobooks and download your free small business resources here.

Three Things Bankers Learned During the Pandemic

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It’s been well documented how the pandemic lead to the digitization of banking on a grand scale.

But what bankers discovered about themselves and the capabilities of their staff was the real eye-opener. Firms such as RSM, an audit, tax and consulting company that works with banks nationwide, saw how teams came together in a crisis and did their jobs effectively in difficult circumstances. Banks pivoted toward remote working, lobby shut-downs, video conferencing and new security challenges while funneling billions in Paycheck Protection Program loans to customers. The C-suites and boards of financial institutions saw that the pandemic tested their processes but also created an opportunity to learn more about their customers.

Overall, the pandemic changed all of us. From our discussions with the leaders of financial institutions, here are three major things bankers learned about themselves and their customers during the pandemic.

1. Customers Want to Use Technology
Banks learned that customers, no matter their generation, were able to use technology effectively. Banks were able to successfully fulfill the needs of their customers, as more devices and technologies are available to banks at all price points and varying degrees of complexity. Post-pandemic, this practice will continue to help increase not only internal efficiencies but convenience for customers. As banks compete with many of the new digital providers, this helps even the playing field, says Christina Churchill, a principal and national lead for financial institutions at RSM US LLP.

Did you have a telemedicine appointment during the pandemic? Do you want to go back to driving to a doctor and sitting in a waiting room for a short appointment, given a choice? Probably not. Nor will bank customers want to come to a branch for a simple transaction, says Churchill.

The pandemic made that all too clear. Banks had to figure out a way to serve customers remotely and they did. Digital account opening soared. Banks stood up secure video conferencing appointments with their customers. They were successful on many counts.

2. Employees Can Work Remotely
The myth that bankers were all working effectively while in the office was exposed. Instead, some found employees were more effective while not in the office.

Technology helped bridge the gap in the existing skill set: Bankers learned how to use technology to work remotely and used it well, says Brandon Koeser, senior manager at RSM. Senior leaders are finding that getting employees back to the office on a strict 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule may be difficult. “Some bankers have asked me, ‘do we return to the office? Do we not go back?’” says Koeser. “And I think the answer is not full time, because that is the underlying desire of employees.”

After surveying 27,500 Americans for a March 2021 study, university researchers predicted that Covid-19’s mass social experiment in working from home will stick around. They estimate about 20% of full workdays will be supplied from home going forward, leading to a 6% boost in productivity based on optimized working arrangements such as less time commuting.

Still, many senior bank leaders feel the lack of in-person contact. It’s more difficult and time-consuming to coach staff, brainstorm or get to know new employees and customers. It’s likely that a hybrid of remote and in-person meetings will resume.

3. Banks Can Stand Up Digital Quickly
Banks used to spend months or years building systems from scratch. That’s no longer the case, says Churchill. Many banks discovered they can stand up technological improvements within days or weeks. Ancillary tools from third-party providers are available quickly and cost less than they did in the past. “You don’t have to build from scratch,” Koeser says. “The time required is not exponential.”

Recently, RSM helped a bank’s loan review process by building a bot to eliminate an hour of work per loan by simply pulling the documentation to a single location. That was low-value work but needed to be done; the bot increased efficiency and work-life quality for the bank team. A robotic process automation bot can cost less than $10,000 as a one-time expense, Churchill says.

Throughout this year, senior bankers discovered more about their staff and their capabilities than they had imagined. “It really helped people look at the way banks can process things,” Churchill says. “It helped gain efficiencies. The pandemic increased the reach of financial institutions, whom to connect with and how.”

The pandemic, it turned out, had lessons for all of us.

Digital Transformation From a Branch Perspective

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If you ask five bankers to define what constitutes a successful digital transformation, you will receive five different answers. However, organizations can employ a few measures to help them succeed, including establishing priorities, assessing capabilities and creating a digital road map.

Meeting current challenges
Many financial institutions were in no rush to transform prior to March 2020. However, the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the implementation of digital-first models. It also put pressure on organizations to battle-test alternative business models supporting remote operations and service delivery. Most notably, banks had to activate remote working models while simultaneously figuring out how to service and support face-to-face customers.

Now in 2021, the initial challenges posed by the pandemic have mostly been addressed. At the same time, bankers acknowledge that branch traffic levels might never recover to pre-pandemic levels.

Establishing priorities
First, organizations should establish priorities. The average mid-size, full-service retail office has annual operating expenses exceeding $350,000 a year — real money that could be repurposed to build a competitive digital service. Unleashing this capital and using it more effectively is key to initiating an effective digital transformation.

One initial objective should be to rank branch locations in terms of profitability and other performance metrics to identify the bottom 20%. In most cases, that percentage represents the locations that have been habitual low performers, or that might be in declining markets or suboptimal locations. It’s important to determine if these locations are leased, and if so, if there is a clear path to exit the lease. These details affect the timeline required to exit and any write-offs or write-downs related to each location.

Digital channels do not work in a vacuum. Experience tells us that community bankers do not like to lay off staff who live and work in these markets, and organizations should consider redeployment of these employees. Reassigned branch personnel can support new customers and existing users as they navigate organization websites and online product applications.

Once organizations understand the exit strategy and cost impact for low-performing locations, they can create plans that outline the timing and potential resources that could be freed up from physical branches and funneled into the digital channel.

Assessing capabilities
After determining the digital transformation budget, organizations should make an honest assessment of their existing capabilities and identify gaps or weaknesses. One goal should be to fix what is broken or not optimal, then prioritize the spend and deployment timeline for true enhancements.

Selecting digital enhancements involves many options, dependencies and complexities, which can slow down decision-making about digital transformation initiatives. Fixing obvious problems first and then investigating enhancements will take time, so organizations don’t need to close low-performing branches immediately.

Executives need to fully understand the features of potential enhancements, what is lacking from current capabilities, what is additive to current capabilities, enhancement release timelines and costs associated with each improvement. They also should consider the roll-out of these features and the impact on existing and future customers.

Creating a digital road map
Creating a digital road map can enable banks to set expectations about when changes to digital services will occur. Doing so requires honest introspection about where the organization is positioned on the digital transformation continuum.

For example, banks might think they have effective online account opening processes, but they should ask: Is it truly an automated, end-to-end process that works at all times under all conditions? Or do deposit operations personnel need to manually move data or paper along to make sure accounts can get set up? Organizations should fully understand where and how their existing customers might be affected, and where and how new customers will be serviced as they open accounts online.

While creating their digital road maps, banks also should take a look at the digital features they’ve already deployed. Are they useful and easy to adopt? Do they drive the user toward desired actions? Do the customers really use the available digital features? Are there benefits to users? If the answers to any of these questions is “no,” organizations should consider removing problematic features or improving processes.

Teeing up for success
Keeping tabs on customer usage trends and optimizing the customer experience should be top priorities in a digital transformation. Banks that make necessary changes can help improve the entire digital experience. To learn more about digital transformation from a branch perspective, view this video.

 

How Community Banks Can Drive Revenue Growth During the Pandemic

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Community banks are the beating heart of the American banking system — and they’ve received a major jolt to their system.

While community banks represent only 17% of the US banking system, they are responsible for around 53% of small business loans. Lending to small businesses calls for relationship skills: Unlike lending to large firms, there is seldom detailed credit information available. Lending decisions are often based on intangible qualities of borrowers.

While community banking is relationship lending at its very best, the pandemic is forcing change. Community bankers have been caught in the eye of the Covid-19 storm, providing lifesaving financial services to small businesses. They helped fuel the success of the Paycheck Protection Program, administering around 60% of total first wave loans, according to Forbes. This was no small feat: Community banks administered more loans in four weeks than the grup had in the previous 12 months.

However, as with many businesses, they have been forced to close their doors for extended periods and move many employees to remote arrangements. Customers have been forced to move to online channels, forming new banking habits. Community banks have risen to all these challenges.

But the pandemic has also shown how technology can augment relationship banking, increase customer engagement and drive revenue growth. Many community banks are doing things differently, acknowledging the need to do things in new ways to drive new revenues.

Even before Covid-19, disruptive forces were reshaping the global banking landscape. Customers have high expectations, and have become accustomed to engaging online and through mobile services. Technology innovators have redefined what’s possible; customers now expect recommendations based on their personal data and previous behavior. Many believe that engaging with their bank should be as easy as buying a book or travel ticket.

Turn Data into Insights, Rewards
While a nimble, human approach and personal service may offset a technical shortcoming in the short run, it cannot offset a growing technology debt and lack of innovation. Data is becoming  the universal driver of banking success. Community banks need to use data and analytics to find new opportunities.

Customer data, like spending habits, can be turned into business insights that empower banks to deliver services where and when they are most needed. Banks can also harness the power of data to anticipate customer life moments, such as a student loan, wedding or a home purchase.

Data can also drive a relevant reward program that improves the customer experience and increases the bank’s brand. Rewards reinforce desired customer behavior, boost loyalty and ultimately improve margins. For example, encouraging and rewarding additional debit transaction activity can drive fee income, while increasing core deposits improves lending margins.

The pandemic also highlights the primacy of digital transformation. With branches closed, banks need to find new ways to interact with customers. Digital services and digitalization allow customers to self-serve but also create opportunities to engage further, adding value with financial wellness products through upselling and cross-selling. In recent months, some community banks launched “video tellers” to offset closed branches. Although these features required investment, they are essential to drive new business and customers will expect these services to endure.

With the right digital infrastructure, possibilities are limited only by the imagination. But it’s useful to remember that today’s competitive advantage quickly becomes tomorrow’s banking baseline. Pre-pandemic, there was limited interest in online account opening; now it’s a crucial building block of an engaging digital experience. Banking has become a technology business — but technology works best with people. Community banks must invest in technologies to augment, deepen and expand profitable relationships.

Leverage Transformative Partnership
Technology driven transformation is never easy — but it’s a lot easier with an expert partner. With their loyal customers, trusted brands and their reputation for responsiveness, community banks start from a strong position, but they need to invest in a digital future. The right partner can help community banks transform to stay relevant, agile and profitable. Modern technologies can make banking more competitive and democratic to ensure community banks continue to compete with greater customer insights, relevant rewards programs and strong digital offerings.

When combined, these build on the customer service foundation at the core of community banking.

Top Four Digital Trends for the Next Five Years

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The sheer amount of disruptions the banking industry endured in 2020 has cast a new light on banking industry trends. But will these disruptions translate into major shifts or further acceleration — especially with regard to digital growth — over the next five years?

Last year, banks saw an unprecedented influx of deposits — $2.4 trillion, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., with gains going primarily to the biggest banks. Looking ahead, we predict further ascendance of the moneycenter banks, but still see opportunities for smaller, nimbler banks to remain competitive when it comes to digital banking innovation. 

Disruptions and Opportunities
The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated compelling reasons for community banks to step up their digital banking efforts. In-person interactions are limited, and even in places where banks are open, many customers may not feel safe. The preference for remote banking is likely to continue into the future: Qualtrics XM Institute found that 80% of people who start banking online are at least somewhat likely to continue.

But the coronavirus is just another tick in the column in favor of greater investments in digital banking. Many community banks have already rolled out online service options in the past few years. Their efforts and investments to make digital banking more user-friendly and efficient is paying dividends.

For instance, Cross River Bank, a community bank with $11.5 billion in assets in Fort Lee, New Jersey, emerged as one of the top Paycheck Protection Program lenders while simultaneously gathering $250 million in deposits in just 15 days. As innovative banking technology becomes more readily available, community banks will have convenient alternatives to legacy vendors that don’t require a massive budget.

What’s Next in Digital Banking?
Banking will continue to evolve rapidly over the next five years. In particular, community institutions should take heed of four trends.

1. Hyper-localized products will help community banks compete with larger institutions.
Community institutions should focus on overall product offerings, not just rates. Digital solutions can offer better tools to connect with the local community, as well as expand a bank’s customer base nationwide.

A major trend for banks to consider is verticalized banking. The big banks aren’t capable of delivering hyper-localized or targeted offerings to the same extent. While these services already exist for certain demographics, such as military personnel and students, we’re seeing this expand to female entrepreneurs, minority-owned businesses and tech developers.

2. Banks are leveraging technology to deepen community relationships.
Covid-19 relief efforts created an opening for tech-savvy community banks to win market share and goodwill among small businesses and communities at-large. These relief efforts will likely continue to be a major area for investment and innovation over the next few years.

A prime example of this is Quontic Bank’s #BetheDrawbridge campaign. The Astoria, New York-based bank’s Drawbridge Savings account matches a portion of interest paid to account holders into a fund providing financial relief to New York City families and businesses. Not only is the bank leveraging digital account opening to broaden its footprint, but also building goodwill within its home-base. 

3. Real-time transaction monitoring becomes table stakes to compete online.
While the U.S. has been slow to adopt real-time payments (RTP), the time is near. The Federal Reserve is working to release its RTP network, FedNow, by 2024; The Clearing House’s RTP Network is quickly expanding.

Community banks should prepare for real-time banking — not only through the implementation of real-time digital servicing, but also through real-time transaction monitoring. Money moves today; if banks don’t receive a report until the next morning, it’s too late. As real-time payments become more accessible, real-time transaction monitoring will be table stakes in order to prevent fraud, mitigate costs and stay competitive.

4. The business banking experience will see major growth and user-friendly improvements.
Commercial banking has so far lagged behind consumer services, remaining manual and paper-based. Fortunately, the innovations that have emerged in personal banking are migrating to the commercial space. This will likely become a major area of focus for technology firms and financial institutions alike.

Looking Ahead
In the next five years, smaller banks will need to double down on digital banking trends and investments, taking advantage of their nimble capabilities. The right tools can make all the difference — the best way for banks to fast-track digital offerings in the next stage of their evolution is to find the right partners and products for their needs.

Why Nailing the Customer Experience Comes Down to Empathy

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While this pandemic has brought many challenges to the financial industry, it’s also brought the opportunity of accelerating customer adoption of your digital banking services.

But it’s also presented an opening for your bank to build genuine customer loyalty and turbocharge your net promoter score.

Difficult times bring out the best and the worst in both people and companies. It’s easy to offer amazing service when things are going well, but it’s how you treat your customers during tough times that builds, or breaks, loyalty. American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Right now is your opportunity to make your customer feel valued, supported and secure. To do that, you need to be empathetic to your customers and your staff.

Consider your customers. They’re stressed.

This is a stressful time for them. Many are financially strained and need advice on the new programs and policies put in place to help them. They’re socially isolated and trying to avoid public places in an effort to stay safe. So, naturally, they’re increasingly banking through your digital channels — but that’s stressful too. How do I use mobile banking? Is it secure? How do I make sure I don’t send money to the wrong person?

To navigate these tricky waters, your customers need access to knowledgeable people who can guide them through your technology, and help them understand how to use your products and services.

Your frontline is your bank. It’s through your frontline that your customers experience your bank. And these are difficult times for frontline staff, too. Many are working from home, and have had to switch roles to handle the increased volume of remote support requests.

At the same time, they don’t have the in-person support of their colleagues, and they don’t have the same toolsets at their disposal. And new programs and policies are being rolled out faster than ever. All this at a time when many of them are experiencing personal difficulties.

You need to provide them with the knowledge, skills, and tools to deliver an exceptional customer experience. For the knowledge and skills part, they need practical training, which has been made more difficult by the pandemic. Instructor-led trainings are off the table, your learning management system could be better. You need an engaging and effective way to train remote staff so they can offer the right solution at the right time for your customers.

One of the biggest holes you need to plug is the lack of employee knowledge and familiarity with your digital products — the very ones you customers need to rely on right now. Many of your staff don’t bank with you, so they’ve never experienced your digital tools. If they’re not familiar with your tech, how can they be expected to promote and support it? To empower them, you need to train them on your tech and give them tools to help customers navigate transactions.

It all works together. The goal during this pandemic is to deliver an exceptional customer experience, to make customers feel secure and valued during a difficult time. Banks that can pull this off will build coveted long lasting customer loyalty. My contention is that empathy is the key to success.

Your customer experience is curated by your frontline employees. If you can remove stress from their jobs with training and support tools, they’ll be in a better position to help your customers. Investing in your frontline and showing them that you care about them will make them feel valued and help you build staff loyalty.

A well-trained, supported and secure frontline will do a much better job of helping your customers get through these tough times. Armed with the knowledge, skills and tools they need, frontline staff will be able make prescient recommendations that promote your products while making the customer feel confident and secure with their banking situation.

In the long run your customers won’t remember the details of each transaction and how it was handled. They’ll remember whether their bank added to their stress, or gave them one less thing to worry about during a trying time.

Scaling Quality Customer Service in the Pandemic Era

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Since February 2020, the pandemic has reshaped everyone’s daily reality, creating a perfect storm of financial challenges.

In early March 2020, the economy was thriving. Six weeks later, over 30 million U.S. workers had filed for unemployment. The pandemic has exacerbated already–crushing consumer debt loads. At the end of the first quarter, nearly 11% of the $1.54 trillion student loan debt was over 90 days past due. Emergency lending programs like the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program have not been renewed.  

Guiding consumers, especially millennials and Gen Z, to financial wellness is critical to the future of financial institutions. These demographics bring long-term value to banks, given their combined spending power of over $3 trillion.

But the banking support system is straining under incredible demand from millions of consumers, and it feels broken for many. Consumers are scrambling for help from their banks; their banks are failing them. With hold times ranging from 20 minutes to three hours, compared with an average of 41 seconds in normal times, customers are having an increasingly aggravating experience. And website content isn’t helping either. Often too generic or laced with confusing jargon like “forbearance,” customers can’t get advice that is relevant to their unique situation and  make good financial choices.

All this comes at a time of restricted branch access. Gone are the days when customers could easily walk into their local branch for product advice. Afraid of coronavirus exposure, most consumers have gone digital. Moreover, many branches are closed, reduced hours or use appointments due to the pandemic. No wonder digital has become an urgent imperative.

How can community banks scale high-quality service and advice cost-effectively in the pandemic era and beyond? The answer lies in a new breed of technology, pioneered by digital engagement automation, powered by artificial intelligence and knowledge. Here is what you can do with it.

Deliver smarter digital services. AI-automated digital self-service enables banks to deliver service to more customers, while lowering costs. For example, next-gen chatbots are often just as effective as human assistance for solving a broad range of basic banking queries, such as bill payments, money transfers and disputed charges. The average cost per agent call could be as high as $35; an AI-powered chatbot session costs only a few pennies, according to industry analysts.

Provide instant access to help. The next generation of chatbots go beyond “meet and greet” and can solve customer issues through AI and knowledge-guided conversations. This capability takes more load off the contact center. Chatbots can walk customers through a dialog to best understand their situation and deliver the most relevant guidance and financial health tips. Where needed, they transition the conversation to human agents with all the context, captured from the self-service conversation for a seamless experience.

Satisfy digital natives. Enhancing digital services is also critical to attracting and keeping younger, digital-native customers. Millennials and Gen Z prefer to use digital touchpoints for service. But in the pandemic era, older consumers have also jumped on the bandwagon due to contact risk.

Many of blue-chip companies have scaled customer service and engagement effectively with digital engagement automation. A leading financial services company implemented our virtual assistant chatbot, which answers customer questions while looking for opportunities to sell premium advice, offered by human advisors. These advisors use our chat and co-browse solution to answer customer questions and help them fill forms collaboratively. The chatbot successfully resolved over 50% of incoming service queries.

The client then deployed the capability for their IT helpdesk, where it resolved 81% of the inquiries. Since then the client has rolled out additional domain-specific virtual assistants for other functional groups. Together, these virtual assistants processed over 2 million interactions in the last 12 months.

The economic road ahead will be rocky, and financial institutions cannot afford to lose customers. Digital engagement automation with AI and knowledge can help scale up customer service without sacrificing quality. So why not get going?

Four Digital Lessons from the Pandemic

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2020, so far, is the year of digital interactions.

Without the ability to interact in the physical world, digital channels became the focal point of contact for everyone. Industries like retail and restaurants experienced a surge in the use of digital services like Instacart, DoorDash and others.

This trend is the same for banks and their customers. In a survey conducted by Aite Group, 63% of U.S. consumers log into financial accounts on a desktop or laptop computer to check accounts at least once a week, while 61% use a smartphone.

The coronavirus pandemic has certainly accelerated the move to the digital channel, as well. In a Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) survey, 45% of respondents report changing the way they interacted with their financial institution because of the pandemic. The increased adoption of the digital channel is here to stay: 30% of respondents from the same survey noting they plan to continue using online and mobile banking channels moving forward.

The same is true for payments. FIS finds that consumers are flocking to mobile wallets and contactless payment to minimize virus risks, with 45% reporting using a mobile wallet and 31% planning to continue using the payment method post-pandemic.

This pandemic-induced shift in consumer preferences provides a few important lessons:

1. Experience Matters
Customers’ experiences in other industries will inform what they come to expect from their bank. Marketing guru Warren Tomlin once said, “a person’s last experience is their new expectation.” No matter where it came from, a great digital experience sets the standard for all others.

Banks should look to other industries to see what solutions can offer a great customer experience in your online and mobile banking channels. Customers’ service experiences with companies like Amazon.com’s set the bar for how they expect to interact with you. Their experience making payments with tools from PayPal Holdings, like Venmo, may inform their impression of how to make payments through the bank.

2. Personalization is Key
Providing a personalized experience for customers is key to the success of your bank, both now and in the future. Your bank’s online and mobile tools must generate a personalized experience for each customer. This makes them feel valued and well served — regardless of whether they are inside a branch or transacting through a mobile app.

Technologies like artificial intelligence can learn each customer’s unique habits and anticipate specific needs they might have. In payments, this might look like learning bill pay habits and helping customers manage those funds wisely. AI can even make recommendations on how users can ensure they have enough funds to cover the month’s bills or save anything they have left over.

AI is also able to look at customer data and anticipate any services they might need next, like mortgages, car loans or saving accounts. It brings the personal banker experience to customers in the digital world.

3. Weave the Branch Into the Digital
The ability to interweave the personalized, in-branch experience into the digital world is crucial. There are positives and negatives in both the branch and digital channels. The challenge for banks is to take the best of both worlds and provide customers with an experience that shines.

Customers want to know that someone is looking out for them, whether they can see that person or not. A digital assistant keeps customers engaged with the bank and provides the peace of mind that, whether they are in the branch or 100 miles away, there is always someone looking out for their financial well-being.

4. Embrace the “Now” Normal
To state that the Covid-19 pandemic changed the world would be a big understatement. It has disrupted what we thought was “business as usual,” and irrevocably changed the future.

The “new normal” changes day by day, so much that we choose to more accurately refer to it as the “now normal.” The increased dependency on digital has made it critical to have the right infrastructure in place . You truly never know what is coming down the line.

Customers enjoy the ease of digital and, more than likely, will not go “back to normal” when it comes to banking and payments. Now, more than ever, is the time to examine the digital experiences that your bank offers to further ensure its prepared for this endless paradigm shift that is the “now normal.”