Bull or Bear, Business Process Management Drives Productivity and Reduces Costs
Business process management ensures a continuous focus on customer retention, cost control/reductiond, performance and asset retention—in spite of economic fluctuation
You’ve heard it before ... The only constant is change. This may be an overused adage, but is especially true when talking about the financial services industry. Economies will fluctuate, markets will change, and investors will react. How you respond to these changes will help define your competitive success.
Companies that continuously invest in improving customer loyalty programs will reap operational and financial benefits. When markets are struggling and investor confidence is low, an increased focus on customer service programs will enhance asset retention efforts. In more confident conditions, continued focus on customer service programs helps create competitive differentiation.
One way to increase customer loyalty while at the same time increasing productivity and reducing operational costs is to implement business process management technology. Empowered with the appropriate technology, you can foster customer loyalty through consistent service, increased response time, and accurate historic customer information.
The right technology infrastructure will help ensure customer loyalty and asset retention, regardless of economic conditions.
The Savvy Consumer
One key to securing customer loyalty is to provide consistent service that meets or exceeds consumers’ expectations. With the increasingly dynamic and accessible Internet, financial-savvy consumers can easily research products and services, weigh competitors, and make smarter decisions.
And with the information consumers have accumulated, they have learned not only what to expect from customer service but also what to demand: comprehensive service that takes into account their customer status and corresponding level of expectation.As a result, the pressure is on to elicit even more than mere satisfaction in services and products. Customer loyalty is about honing progressive, committed connections between you and your consumers. After all, how important is a “satisfied” customer who does not return?
Laying the Technology Foundation
More and more financial services companies are discovering that business process management is an effective way to ensure increased customer-centric operations and reduced operational costs.
In the continuum of opportunities for cost reduction and service improvement, business process management builds on a foundation of imaging and document management, workflow, task management, and process automation.
If process automation is the pinnacle of productivity, imaging and document management is the bedrock. This includes, but is not limited to, the capture, storage, and retrieval of customer information that has been scanned, faxed, or electronically received into the system.
Workflow moves those images and documents to the appropriate processing areas, while at the same time monitoring the progress of that work. Also, rules-based workflow ensures that the right people are processing the right items at the right time, typically resulting in 20% to 35% productivity gains.
Task management monitors individual processing steps and automates/eliminates them at the desktop level. If a task does require associate intervention, task management will guide the associate through pre-defined steps to ensure each task is completed with accuracy.
Process automation can then be applied to the work steps when human intervention is not required, resulting in additional process improvement. From a foundation of imaging and document management, workflow, and task management, process automation eliminates whole groups of manual steps, leading to significant productivity gains and customer retention.
According to a recent study, the healthcare insurance industry alone spends an estimated $250 billion or more annually on labor-intensive, paper-based processing. With business process management, healthcare insurance and other financial services companies can eliminate paper-based processing, dramatically expedite customer service response and reduce operational costs.
Be Prepared
Capitalizing on opportunities to enhance customer loyalty while reducing costs through business process management does require preparation. You must be able to clearly define the business processes executed during service delivery. This includes defining processes for simple transactions while identifying the exceptions that may occur.
By examining every processing step, you can implement targeted technology solutions to ensure that your customers are receiving unprecedented levels of service. Automating processes associated with servicing the customer ensures a continuous focus on customer retention, cost control/reduction, overall performance, and increased asset retention—in spite of current or future economic fluctuation.
Markets will change and investor behavior will shift, but companies equipped with the right technology infrastructure will react to those changes seamlessly.
Rick is Product Manager at DST Systems, Inc., for the AWD product suite. He has worked for 22 years with content and digital rights management, document imaging, and workflow. To help define new market concepts, Rick is a speaker and panelist for industry events and publishes articles and white papers