By Rodolfo Luis Pereira, Enterprise Solutions Director at Noesis
We are living in challenging times for all economic sectors and also for the financial industry. In the context of moratoriums, and when their end is expected, this was a widely used mechanism to alleviate the economic effort of our citizens and companies.
If, on the one hand, this initiative sought to mitigate part of the impact caused by this pandemic, it also created a procedural problem for financial institutions, with the sudden appearance of requests and the need for a quick response, added to the situation of confinement in which we found ourselves. The end of moratoriums is an excellent example of how the pandemic (and technology) can accelerate the financial sector's digital transformation. Most of the processes implemented by most banks, to deal with requests for credit defaults, traditional PDF documents were made available, asking the customer to take a set of slow steps - document download, print it, fill it out. And manual signature, paper scanning, and sending to an email account created for this purpose.
To this little "agile" and minimal user-friendly process for the customer was added the subsequent back-office process where, busily, without any (or few) integrations or automation, employees of these institutions had to process all these requests and "move forward" the processes. Finally, a daunting task of bureaucratic inefficiency is more or less visible to the end customer, who, however, despaired an answer to his request.
It is with these kinds of inefficiencies that technology can make a difference. It is necessary to innovate in processes, betting on a vision of effective digitalization of the channel and touchpoints with customers. But this vision should focus not only on the customer experience, facilitating those looking to submit a request, but also on the institution's internal response flow, supporting those who then have the task of evaluating the request and providing for it internally. This innovation in the approach and the tools used makes it possible, for example, to design a personalized service 24x7 using artificial intelligence in conversation – Bot or chatbot.
The Bot allows you to "guide" a customer through the entire process, through the different steps necessary to submit their orders. It is also responsible for previously validating the eligibility of these requests and the documentation required for each step. By integrating this Bot with other types of solutions, it is possible to truly dematerialize the entire process, using electronic signature features and integration with the organization's IT systems.
This guarantees more incredible speed in the entire process, accessible from any device, with low need for technical, procedural, or computer literacy and, more importantly, providing the customer with an easier and more efficient interaction experience with their Bank. Also, in terms of internal efficiency and associated costs, the gains are evident.
This view that a customer, with their mobile device, can interact with a virtual assistant, benefiting from a wholly dematerialized service and guaranteeing an apparent reduction in the effort of both the financial institution and itself, may seem almost a mirage, but it is available to any organization.
Back to the example of moratoria, this concept was tested in a banking institution and increased up to 10x more processes in the same period and with the same human resources. Something that used to take hours is today executed in just a few minutes.
A relatively simple solution with low investment, proven results, and quick implementation is a clear example of the pandemic context's digital acceleration.
Published (In Portuguese) in Jornal Económico
