Issue 1 2010 | £5.95 €8.00 $8.95www.banking-gateway.com

Unlock customer value

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We investigate how to enhance the customer experience

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Customer experience management

38 Future Banking | www.banking-gateway.com

Long gone are the days of static web pages where the only thing moving was a marquee flashing “Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!” The modern web is

slick, customisable and social. While networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook are leading the way, retailers have also reaped the benefits, and consumers expect the experience of using those sites to be replicated wherever they are online.

Banks, however, have been slow to make use of new technologies and approaches, despite the potential growth opportunities they offer. Customisation of services empowers customers to identify their needs and mould their experience accordingly. In the process they send preference indicators to the bank, generating data that can be used to drive marketing and sales activities such as cross- and up-selling financial services.

Interaction also holds great potential. Discussion about financial products is already taking place on forums and using social media. Banks need to tune into those conversations to understand what they can be doing better and where their competitors are perceived to have an edge.

Pace of changeJouk Pleiter, founder and CEO of Backbase, has witnessed the changes first-hand, having been involved in online business since 1995. In recent years the pace of change has only become quicker. “Five years ago we could only consume pages: we could read them and we could print them,” he says. “Today we can actually comment, provide ratings and read reviews from other users.”

He characterises the first generation of banks’ online activities as a broadcast model or an inside-out approach. This mindset needs to change if they are to move forward: “To be truly successful, organisations need to be more customer-centric. Instead of talking about products or creating portals for lines of business, they need to start thinking about needs and personas and looking at the customer journey.”

He describes this way of thinking as “outside-in” and the first step is identifying segments of customers who have similar requirements and habits. Content and services can be repacked to target groups such as students, small business owners or joint account holders, but it is possible to go even further and give individual customers complete control over how they interact with a bank’s services online.

Pleiter makes the analogy with homepages such as iGoogle, or Apple’s app ecosystem. “You can completely

tailor your iPhone based on your preferences,” he says. “There are 80,000 apps out there and consumers can select which ones they want to use. We see that as being the future for retail banking too.”

So when customers log on to their internet banking, instead of being confronted with a standard page, they are taken to a customisable dashboard. The building blocks of this environment are widgets or mini applications designed to fulfil a specific purpose, pay a bill or calculate interest on a mortgage, for example. Users can choose which widgets they want enabled, matching the environment to their usage pattern.

Pleiter describes the first round of online banking as the “web enablement” of existing services. “Traditional online banking needs an upgrade. Customers are enjoying this next level interaction with other on-line retail vendors and are looking for the same experience in their banking,” he says. “Many banks still use a flat transactional self-service online system. They have yet to rethink their approach to customer service when moving online and the strain is beginning to show.

“Backbase enables business professionals at financial services organisations to take the lead in customer-centric online innovation, improve e-business results, and optimise online customer interaction.

“As our conversations with banks illustrate, the online banking portal has changed little over the past ten years. In stark contrast to the one-size-fits-all approach of a traditional portal, Backbase allows organisations to automatically emulate the face-to-face banking experience that recognises each customer’s unique financial needs and responds accordingly.”

Mash upThe company’s mash-up engine is the key to pulling everything together. It works with a bank’s infrastructure to serve up information through the portal and send details of transactions back to be processed.

A major challenge in creating new ways for customers to interact online is maintaining high levels of security. Backbase works with the bank’s existing model but complements it with additional features necessary for the widget architecture, such as strong authentication and single sign-on capabilities.

Pleiter describes Backbase as a “presentation layer”, but adds: “It’s not just a pretty face because you need to go one step deeper and provide security, mash-up capabilities, content and personalisation.”

Internet banking 2.0Since online banking became mainstream, the web has moved on. Jouk Pleiter of Backbase tells Future Banking how new thinking and technology is helping innovative banks set the pace of change.

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Unlike some vendors, Backbase is not afraid to let IT teams get under the hood of the system and let them tinker at a nuts and bolts level. This might simply mean skinning the portal to include branding elements, but it also opens the door to more sophisticated development activities.

The platform relies entirely on industry standard mark-ups and programming languages such as Java, .NET, XML and HTML and, as with other web-native services, Backbase has a completely open application programming interface (API). The combination of these elements enables teams with standard web design skills to tweak the performance of widgets or develop their own from scratch.

“The portal is like a two-way mirror,” Pleiter explains. “On the one hand we can empower the customer, but

e-marketers can also sit on the other side and make observations to develop more targeted communication with a particular segment or individual.

“In the past, companies had to use focus groups to get an understanding of what their customers wanted. Now they can analyse the behaviour of real users online and do so almost in real time.”

Business managers can feed in their ideas and requirements via a dashboard similar to that used by the customer. Built-in analytics tools can track key metrics and

aid in the setting of new business goals. The platform’s distributed architecture cuts down the lead times for projects dramatically, reducing the cost of experimentation, and because the system is robust and offers a strong governance model, IT teams can be confident handing control to units pursuing commercial objectives.

“You no longer have this monolithic application, instead you chop your services model into small components,” Pleiter explains. “It’s like Lego, the blocks operate autonomously and you can add one or remove one without the house collapsing.”

In addition to data and transactions, Backbase supports content services, the texture around interactions, such as news about products and tutorials. “We can aggregate

valuable information from any source,” Pleiter explains, “be that from an internal marketing department, an external supplier like Thomson Reuters, or even user-generated content where you empower the customer to contribute.”

Backbase also allows banks to optimse the online customer journey, engaging people through new dialogue models, such as personal start page, live chat and co-browse, financial calculators, product finders, and other interactive applications that help customers meet their goals while creating cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

Help is at handWhile flexibility and a wide range of options make Backbase a powerful tool, it also runs the risk of overwhelming a new client. To overcome this, the company has a multi-disciplinary team of experts who offer a tailored mix of user experience design services, E-business optimisation and implementation services as well as system architects and software engineers. The team can work closely with in-house IT staff to optimise the system.

Backbase presents significant advantages for customers, IT teams and business managers alike. Customisation empowers account holders and encourages them to build a strong relationship with the bank. Inside the organisation, the platform’s flexibility and usability make achieving objectives easier.

The company is presenting an innovative portal software solution that can transform a financial portal into a dynamic online sales channel that drives new revenues. ■

Customer experience management

39Future Banking | www.banking-gateway.com

The reality is you can’t hide anything on the internet, the information is out there and organisations need to find a way to work with it and engage in a dialogue rather than just ignoring it.

Further informationBackbase www.backbase.comTel: +31 20 465 8888

Backbase is a leader in providing targeted web services.

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