How can real-time personalisation drive your CX strategy?

Digitalisation shouldn’t just be limited to processing automation – it can significantly  improve customer experience.  

Singapore’s financial sector has performed strongly throughout the pandemic, with the  sector growing by an annual average of 7.2% during 2020 to 2021 – four times faster than  the overall economy. According to a speech by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director,  Monetary Authority of Singapore, the last 2 years also saw 5,800 net jobs created in the  local financial services industry.

However, amidst the rapid growth lingers a significant challenge – with the ever-evolving  financial ecosystem where revenues can be quickly lost to nimble competitors, how can a  financial institution maintain their competitive edge, while keeping up with their customers’  demands?

Propelled by the increasingly pervasive use of technology in our local financial sector, many  firms are now attempting to address this challenge by adopting digitalisation initiatives,  with varying degrees of success. Operationally, digitalisation can provide many benefits  around automating and streamlining workflows. And in terms of process, a low-touch  approach can certainly lead to increased efficiencies and reduced costs. But digitalisation  shouldn’t just be limited to processing automation, as it can significantly improve Customer  Experience (CX). 

To keep up with customer demands and stay ahead of their competitors, more financial  institutions are now recognising that they need a well-defined strategy around CX and  personalisation, to operate in today’s highly efficient electronic markets. By taking customer first, client focused and high-touch approach by delivering a better service  experience (digital or otherwise) firms can continue to retain and grow their customer base.  Thereby maintaining their sales, trading margins and growing revenues. 

Forward-looking firms are also realising how digitalisation can help improve CX for both  their internal users and external customers. Much of this revolves around how internal  teams collaborate and how their internal systems can be made to interoperate. Getting data  out of siloed systems has historically been cumbersome, but with the growing use of the  cloud, APIs and common data models; data has become much more accessible than ever  before. And can now be deployed across an entire organisation with personalised  experiences for each end-user. 

The rapid pace of digitalisation in the financial markets sector has triggered a deluge of data  from diverse sources and platforms, across both the buy-side and the sell-side. With data  able to drive valuable insights, many financial institutions are now investing in advanced AI,  machine learning and data analytics engines to predict customer needs, further understand customer intent and to deliver highly contextual, actionable messages in real-time to those  customers. Firms that can provide this level of real-time personalisation will undoubtedly  gain an advantage over their competitors. Today’s customers’ demands include flexible, fast  access to available services and high visibility into the performance of those services. 

Another key area where firms are transforming and making improvements to customer  experience, is enabling customers to ‘self-serve’ without having to go through long and  convoluted onboarding processes. And this can be achieved by partnering with trusted third  parties to deliver apps and other services seamlessly through the user interface. Like other  global providers, we’re developing automated, self-service tools giving customers agility to  manage their services in-line with their business needs, so they can stay ahead of  competition. 

For firms looking to accelerate their digitalisation initiatives and improve their own CX with  new data sources and applications, we can rapidly provision new connections between on net sites, or upgrades to existing ones on the BT Radianz network - providing customers  with near real-time performance statistics of each network connection. Recent innovations  include our partnership with ServiceNow, to create a simplified, automated, more  programmable network and cloud infrastructure. A key element of this is the market’s first  native telco customer integration app, called ‘eBonding for Telecommunications’, which  accelerates incident, change and service request responsiveness. 

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Kerry Fulker is the Senior Manager of BT Radianz and is responsible for leading the investments and major programmes that transform the BT Radianz portfolio and platforms. Kerry is passionate about delivering a superior customer experience to BT Radianz customers by expanding the engagement channels across the entire customer journey, offering a seamless experience with full automation and enhanced tools. She is also committed to working alongside the BT Radianz portfolio team to ensure their services continue to deliver the right outcomes for the capital markets customers as they evolve for the next generation.