Lending has evolved—from customers travelling to the bank and financial institution to today’s lending processes which is digital and streamlined compared to the past. However, these banks and NBFCs fail to deliver an intuitive customer experience owing to legacy systems.
Lending institutions need to evolve out of their silos into an integrated system that offers a personalised experience taking into account customer relationships as a whole rather than one product or service at a time.
Introduction
One of the core drivers for digital transformation is the need for banks and NBFCs to transform the customer experience. Today’s customer has zillions of alternatives, and bad customer experiences will certainly make him move towards better avenues to serve his needs. Hence, retaining your loyal customers and attracting new customers can only be possible by providing seamless and personalised experiences, and making them a top priority every time. The need for an intuitive, frictionless digital borrower experience is increasingly becoming the key to lenders’ success.
Transforming Customer Experience
Customer Experience is a top focus area for leading global banks and lending institutions. While expanding their footprints across varied geographies and catering to diverse customer demographics, financial institutions need to consider their customers’ expectations, realise the importance of cross channel journeys, and offer innovative cross-channel integrations, albeit on practical terms. They need to engage a new generation of consumers, one built around digital natives—those who expect frictionless experiences, near realtime accountability, and continuity across digital and branch experiences.
To meet these expectations, financial institutions need to start considering customer journeys—the high-value steps people undertake across channels.
Current loan origination systems and processes have the following challenges, where customers are most likely to abandon the process and switch to a competitor.
- Irrelevant products or services
- Information captured multiple times, in multiple places
- Delay in getting a pre-approval
- Excessive or unreasonable document requests
- Inability to transition between channels
- Not offered relationship/loyalty pricing
- Submission of multiple applications for multiple products
- Multiple in-person visits to the branch
- No visibility into real-time status of application
Originations and on-boarding are the first customer touch points that provide banks and NBFCs with an opportunity to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s unique individual needs. It is an opportunity to exceed their expectations and deliver ‘wow’ moments.
A good origination process will lead to good business outcomes—decrease costs to process the application, decrease manual processing, increase activation rates, and ultimately strengthen customer relationships.
Omnichannel Origination:
Typically, the customer’s first touch point is initiation across multiple channels. While millennials prefer digital channels, older generations still make offline visits to the branches. Post initiation too, the prospective borrower continues to have multiple touchpoints across his/her journey.
Having a single view of the customer is proven to reduce customer drop offs and enhance conversions leading to improved revenue streams. Hence, enabling multichannel onboarding and omnichannel origination supported by modern architecture and workflows is a must for lenders.
Customised Loan Journeys:
Customer data, combined with machine learning, helps personalise the offerings and delivers effective customer-centric communication at the right time. Systems that provide the flexibility and agility to easily configure and launch new loan products enable customised loan journeys and provide customer journey and ecosystem maps as a unifying methodology to help them prioritise and build great digital and cross-touchpoint customer experiences.
Mobility:
Lending institutions have joined the race of going mobile owing to the demand of the smartphone users today. Leveraging the ground-breaking capabilities of smartphones have helped them to streamline their workflow and reduce their overall turnaround time. Lending institutions can now render information, services and applications for consumption in smartphones and tablets, and support it through experience managers that can easily enable the financial institutions to make field level changes of web and mobile.
Real time Loan Processing:
Real-time processing can act as a massive fuel in transforming the experience for customer. Today’s lending systems can support eKYC, e-sign and digital locker with integrations such as Indiastack to submit documents online, provide easy access of credit scores from credit bureaus, verify documents in real-time, detect fraud and integrate with payment gateways that can enable quicker decision making and disbursal.
Personalisation:
Personalisation of digital content is a huge challenge for any lending institution, as it can drive a more meaningful customer engagement. There are multiple factors that can affect personalisation such as customer’s profile and demographics, historical data, transactional data as well as the behavior displayed on the platform in real time. Combining all these features will provide robust personalised content, which improves customer experience on the platform and derives a far superior engagement. Additionally, this can also enable financial institutions in remarketing/email campaigns/DSP buys.
Conclusion
As we move into new era, getting the customer experience right will become more important for lending institutions worldwide. Lenders that are able to successfully thread that needle in light of changing consumer expectations, emerging capabilities and shifting market conditions will likely find continued success. The growing appetite for technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, biometrics and chat bots, and increasing data sources each year will help lending institutions to focus more on their customer’s needs.
Transforming Customer Experience in Lending with Kuliza
Kuliza’s Lend.In Suite prioritises customer experience along with operational excellence, to ensure that the customers will enjoy their interactions with the lender across their journey. Customers will have a seamless experience irrespective of the channel they choose to interact on. It will not only meet their customer’s expectations but will strive to exceed them resulting in better customer experiences. Rather than run-of-the-mill offerings, customers will be presented with tailored experiences and products suited to their needs.
For more information on how Kuliza’s Lend.In can transform your lending experience, reach out to contact@Kuliza. com today.
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