3 technology experts discuss initiatives to improve customer experience:
While information technology has undoubtedly contributed towards the development of the banking sector in general, it is the application of technology in maximizing customer satisfaction and offer personalized services to the customers that has been the differentiating factory. Most visible among banks in India, which have implemented technology and changed the way they were operating are the public sector banks. They brought about phenomenal changes in the way they operate, the way they service their clients, and the manner in which they identified efficiency and measured it in the context of offering varied services. For private sector banks, the task had been easier, as most of them did not have any legacy systems and they began operations on sound and established technology platforms.
However, technology induction in cooperative banks in the country has not been an easier task mainly because of the several constraints these banks faced.
ADOPTING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Aarti Dhole, CIO, Cosmos Cooperative Bank, says both private and public sector banks are using technology to provide quality, faster and better services to their customers. They focus on investment and tax advisory services, cash management services, electronic funds transfer, and use digital channels to offer banking services. Their product range is vast and the rates offered are competitive as compared to the cooperative banks. This has been a major challenge for cooperative banks, she adds.
Dhimant Turakhia, Chief Liaison Officer, The Kalupur Commercial Cooperative Bank, believes there has been a major change in the entire banking scenario over a period with severe competition among PSU banks, private sector banks and cooperative banks in acquiring customers as customers have become more studious and choosy, the many options available to them these days and information being available to them at the click of a mouse, especially on various services, product range, pricing, etc in the marketplace.
The Kalupur Commercial Cooperative Bank, he says, has adopted ‘Customer First’ as its motto. “We have been studying and keeping a constant watch on the changing needs, tastes, expectations, anxieties, etc of the customers from time to time and we have been developing new products and bringing about changes/ modifications in available products to ultimately suit the requirements of customers,” says Dhimant.
He adds: “I can say that our bank is perhaps offering the best and most competitive pricing for our products and services and we could achieve desired yoy growth in business figures. We are a continuously profit-making and dividend-paying bank with close to Rs 150 billion of business mix and net worth close to Rs.16 billion with net NPA zero and CRAR 18%.”
DIGITAL BANKING EXPERIENCE
Mannu Singh, Vice-President, Tata Teleservices, says the banking industry has set its post-covid digital transformation journey, and the trends include focus on seamless and secured digital banking experiences for its customers. Banks are also evolving organized structure for employees to continue working remotely or a hybrid system, ensuring business continuity in times of disruptions or crises and increased use of cloud technology. They are also putting an escalated emphasis on cybersecurity and data privacy and most of them see use of analytics and AI for predictive personalization as the way ahead.
Says he: “A recent industry survey had suggested that banking industry is eager to invest in technologies for cybersecurity, cloud computing, data privacy and digital channels to meet the demands of the consumers, who are now comfortable banking on digital platforms.”
TECHNOLOGIES TO REDUCE TAT
Cosmos Bank has introduced a call center, chatbot and customer relation module to attend to inquiries from the customers. The bank has reduced waiting time at each level of the customer interaction – a call is answered within 2 rings, average hold time is not more than 30 seconds and response over email or social media is within the working day. All these help to improve efficiency in the communication channel.
The bank also provides continuous training to its staff through e-learning modules as it has found that trained and knowledgeable staff is more effective when it comes to dealing with vexed customers. Competent staff can bring down the number of customers that reach the irate level and this, in turn, raises the number of queries they can effectively respond to.
The bank also provides a self-service kiosk for cash deposits, passbook printing, statements, stop cheque and portals like internet banking, mobile app and missed call facility to serve the customers faster and without any manual intervention/attendance. This reduces the service time and increases the window of availability.
Aarti shares details: “We have upgraded our Finacle core banking solution to the latest version, which supports API integration with third-party service providers. The corporate customers can now directly carry out banking operations straight through using their ERP systems as their accounting systems are connected to the bank’s CBS. Channels like ATM, POS, e-commerce, NACH, AEPS, UPI, IMPS are now 24×7.”
CONTINUOUS UPDATING
Dhimant says Kalupur Commercial Cooperative Bank, besides being a cooperative bank, had visualized the need for adopting and upgrading technology as an ongoing basis to serve its customers with speed, accuracy and at minimum TAT to counter competition.
He adds: “Today, we are a 100% digital bank with the latest version of Finacle, offering net banking, mobile banking, ATM services, e-remittances, BBPS, UPI, SMS service, e-statements, missed call inquiries, and such similar services matching the offerings of other banks.”
Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) has an array of solutions to help cooperative banks leverage digitization. The company has introduced Smart VPN An MPLS-based virtual private network that enables banks to share data securely and confidentially over any internet service from any location. Its Smart Internet Leased Line is a dedicated source of internet service with uncontended bandwidth and symmetric upload and download for remote users, bundled with cloud security. It also has Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a signalling protocol to facilitate interactive communication sessions, including voice, video and chat over the internet. Hosted PBX is another feature-rich SIP-based telephony solution for outbound calls from any location. Cyber security solutions are developed for countering increasing cyber threats and data breaches.
The company also offers endpoint security, email security, web security, multi-factor authentication, and virtual firewall. Its Smartflo cloud communication suite is an ultra-flexible and secured communication platform on the cloud that enables anytime, anywhere, and any device connectivity.
HOW SMARTFLO WORKS
Mannu Singh shares the details about Smartflo: “Smartflo allows uninterrupted connectivity between all stakeholders – internally within employees and externally with customers and vendors across platforms of voice and data and helps in building efficiency and boosting customer experience in a cost-effective, secure, and scalable manner. The solution is backed by our 24×7 managed services support and we have been enabling thousands of businesses in banking and finance sector to build robust resilience and deliver exceptional customer experience.”
COMMUNICATOIONS & COLLABORATIONS
Protection of customer data is one of the key values for Kalupur Commercial Cooperative Bank. It believes in securing data by all possible measures and one of the methods is to opt for a hybrid model where customer data always resides within the bank’s own data center. The bank has its own production data center and DR data centers. These data centers are fully equipped with modern systems including water leakage detection, smoke detection, CCTV monitoring, fire detection, alarming hooters, precision cooling, biometric access systems, redundant UPS, and DG sets. Virtualization technology of VMware is deployed to cater to large requirements of servers with adequate memory and compute (Cores).
Dhimant says the bank has deployed one of the best in class 4-node power edge solutions wherein any hardware or logical failure of the physical node makes the seamless automatic movement of virtual servers to other running nodes. End-user service or application downtime is minimized to less than 1 minute by this way.
The bank’s data storage system is powered by IBM Flash System 5100, EMC VNX 1600, EMC Unity300 All-Flash, Dell ScV2020, Hitachi HUS 300 and EMC Unity300 NAS. This is a mixture of high-end SSD disk to store hot data and SAS disk to store cold data. The storage system takes care of growth requirements of the next 2 years and is configured with RAID level to provide redundancy over disk failure. The bank uses high-end spine and leaf architecture in data center switching which provides even redundancy in component failure at central objects. Firewall architecture is placed with 3 different zones – user zone, server zone and internet zone, which provides added security layer. All remote locations, as well as head office resources, can be managed centrally from the bank’s NOC.
Cosmos Bank has established IVR call centers as well as a video conferencing platform at every touchpoint. The customers can directly connect through these platforms with the bank officials. Webex platforms are available for virtual meetings and customer discussions, education, awareness, and training.
Aarti points out that SMS platforms are used to make customers aware of the happenings, new products and provide any essential communication from the bank. Customer meets are arranged by the bank to communicate with the customers. TV screens, social media like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn are used to communicate with customers.
EVOLVED CONNECTIVITY
Tata Tele Business Services helps banks with evolved connectivity and security solutions for operational efficiency and improved customer experience. Mannu Singh says: “As the cooperative banking sector sets upon its post-covid digital transformation journey, the key imperatives that it must consider include a robust smart internet connectivity, which is highly secured and focus on enhancing digital banking experiences as customers are becoming more comfortable with digital modes of banking and transactions.”
He also says banks must emphasise more on the adoption of cloud solutions which are capex and opex light and provide anywhere, anytime working flexibility to the banking workforce, stress more on cybersecurity and data privacy to provide secured and uninterrupted services.
IMPROVING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Cosmos Bank has enterprise-level SLAs with giant network service providers like Tatas, MNTL, BSNL, Reliance, and Jio for MPLS, broadband and internet connectivity. The clauses include provision of 99.9% uptime with the penalty clauses. The bank has also arranged for backup connectivity at each touchpoint with the primary and secondary connectivity.
Says Aarti: “In case one fails the other will be available seamlessly. The SD-WAN technology is being introduced to keep the network up and running. We have introduced network monitoring tools to monitor glitches/ performance issues in the network and take proactive action. Shadow ports are arranged from the service provider for the DR of the network.”
She also says the BCP of the critical applications is available along with 100% DR of the customer service applications like CTS, CBS, digital channels like internet banking, mobile banking, ATM, UPI, IMPS, NEFT, and RTGS. This way, the connectivity uptime is maintained.
Kalupur Commercial Cooperative Bank provides 24X7 services and secure connectivity is of paramount importance. The bank has ILL/MPLS service providers for all branches and remote locations. Redundancy at each stage is achieved with two links from different service providers for each of the locations. High-speed ILL/MPLS links are deployed between the bank’s data center and DR site to enable databases to be in sync mode and make recovery point objective (RPO) less than 30 minutes in case of disaster.
Says Dhimant: “All our remote locations/branches are enabled with SD-WAN, which even provides redundancy in case of link failure. In nutshell, we are on a growth path all around, with a focus on regulatory compliances equally, aiming towards achieving sustained and consistent quality growth, thereby offering 24×7 and anywhere banking. We believe in enhancing and enriching customer experience and wish to see smiles on their faces.”
Tata Tele Business Services works as a progressive digital catalyst to enable the banks to adopt the best connectivity and collaboration solutions that significantly boost their customer experience and help them ‘do big’.
CONNECTIVITY IS CORE
Mannu Singh says some of the cooperative banks lack reliable connections that can ensure secure transactions and protection of all customer data. Given the transaction data’s sensitive nature, there is a need for a seamless and secure communication channel that provides the right collaborative tools to make transactions more efficient. They must also make sure that they are equipped with an easy to configure hosted infrastructure that facilitates a distributed working environment, he adds.
The company offers AI-powered chatbots besides the Smartflo cloud communication suite, SIP Trunk and Toll-free Numbers. The company has recently partnered with Zoom Video to offer world-class video conferencing facilities that enable the employees to collaborate effectively with their teams and customers across geographies in a secured and scalable manner. The company has a toll-free number that can help cooperative banks to bring a paradigm shift in customer experience by enabling customers to conveniently reach out to the bank without any cost. This is also as per RBI’s recommendation.
