By Michael Allen, Solutions VP, Dynatrace

Today’s banks are investing heavily in digital transformation initiatives to make it more convenient for their customers to access their services, from any place, at any time, in whichever way they prefer. While making the transition from legacy retail banking IT systems to the current multi-channel digital environment, banks are also making vigorous efforts to tackle the challenges brought about by ongoing digital customer shifts, market evolutions and the need to meet increasingly demanding user expectations.

However, despite the speed at which banks are transforming their services to increase speed and improve the convenience and user-experience, they are still struggling to keep up with the increasingly demanding expectations of their customers As such, banks need to adopt a broader picture of customer behaviour to better understand and serve their market in more innovative ways.

First and foremost, they need to ensure they are able to deliver a great user experience across all digital channels at the moment and place of the customer’s need. However, thinking further ahead, they also need to find ways to promote or upsell relevant products and services to their customers. The most effective way of doing this is to look at customers’ usage patterns, service satisfaction levels and the past outcomes following their interactions with the bank.

Tapping into the data boom

Banks require actionable performance intelligence about their customers’ experience each time they interact with the organisation regardless of which web, mobile web or mobile application platform is being used. The best source of this information lies in the wealth of data that customers create every time they interact with a digital service. However, despite millions of dollars spent on customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence tools, which are now collecting tremendous amounts of this data, banks still face a major challenge in using it effectively.

Many are still unable to zero in on individual customer transactions and correlate user behaviour with business insights to understand why some transactions are completed whilst others are abandoned. These granular insights must be available in real-time if they are to be of most use in improving services; enabling frontline staff to quickly intervene if a customer is experiencing any disruptions or poor service delivery. Proactively reaching out to these customers can help banks to prevent transactions from being abandoned and safeguard customer relationships.

Keeping an eye on things

By having 24/7 visibility into every single users’ digital interactions, across every digital platform, banks are able to understand their customers better and have the ability to study their experience and behaviour more intimately. If there are any disruptions or anomalies, front-line staff can also pick up on the signs and send alerts to the IT team so that quick action can be taken before significant negative customer impact occurs.

Additionally, banks should be tracking real-time trends of the most popular transactions performed by users, so that they can identify which digital services they should be prioritising for improvement.

This information can be used to enrich existing data sets by combining user behavioural insights and the quality of the digital experiences being delivered to customer with existing analytical tools, business intelligence, CRM or even data warehouse platforms. This can enable banks to better segment and profile their customer base to better understand their preferred interaction channels and resolve any potential issues before they create an impact. In so doing, the banks can protect their reputation from being damaged by negative customer experiences and strengthen existing customer relationships.

For the IT and Operations teams, digital services performance intelligence provides them with an avenue to quickly identify problem areas related to the network, infrastructure or applications. Even when the performance issues reside in the application layer, they can share the relevant data with the application and development teams, thereby reducing the time needed to resolve the problem with analytics data that provides a shared “single source of truth.” This means the banks’ IT teams can enjoy improved cross-teams alignment, better turnaround times in fixing customer experience issues and more time for innovation instead of looking through endless amounts of log files whenever users complain.

Improving the business outlook

Performance intelligence is a powerful asset in helping banks to safeguard their brand image by delivering great user experiences across all digital touchpoints. It also equips tech teams with greater agility by giving them advanced warning of any potential issues that could impact the customer experience and help them to identify the root-cause right down to the individual line of application code. This ensures IT resources are channelled towards delighting customers through every single interaction, regardless of the channel they choose to do business with the bank. Ultimately, the ability to correlate performance related insights with business and performance data to better meet the exacting expectations of modern digital customers will be essential for any bank that wants to stay ahead of the competition in an increasingly crowded landscape.