When you think of technology integration, what comes to mind?
Hopefully, you think about possibilities: unlocking new capabilities and efficiencies for you and your customers and improving experiences and outcomes aligned with your goals. Or, do you feel stress reflecting on complexity, personal and organizational effort, fits and starts, and disruptions of past integrations that may not have gone reasonably as expected? We’ve all been there, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Forget “no pain, no gain!”
Over the past several years, mobile and browser-based technology has taken center stage in how we do business with our financial services customers, members, and policyholders. Many of the features and capabilities we now offer consumers are possible because of technology integrations that extend the value of our core, foundational fintech platforms.
Customer interaction technology is an excellent example of that. Every customer-facing app or portal needs a way to assist consumers when they need help. In a digital world, it’s critical to do so at the point of need or risk losing business. Adding and unifying digital interaction channels is a must! The more seamlessly you integrate them into your fintech stack and overall customer service operations, the better for all.
Some integrations are “seamless;” others are not so much!
The value you receive from your investment in online banking (OLB), loan origination systems (LOS), Insurtech platforms, and similar depends on consumer adoption and use, which correlates with overall customer experience (CX). Providing assistance and guidance at the point of need has been proven to positively impact all three if the CX is seamless and productive.
On the surface, many customer interaction technology providers appear similar. Underneath, how well they integrate with fintech providers, plus the time and effort required to see results—if at all—varies wildly. Ensure your chosen technology provider provides a seamless, unified interaction management platform and can demonstrate measurable value in a reasonable time frame. Overly long technology deployments rob you of immediate opportunities to increase efficiency, revenue, and CSAT.
Here are a few quick but essential things to consider when choosing a customer interaction solution to enhance your fintech platform(s):
Purpose-Built Solutions
Financial institutions (FIs) have unique needs, requirements, and challenges. Whether or not we’re talking about integration, broad horizontal technology providers design their technology for the least common denominators. They can’t provide the same level of understanding and expertise of your business—not to mention security and compliance—that a FI-centric provider can. Look for purpose-built solutions for financial services.
Experience and Relationships Move the Needle
So, you’ve found a potentially good fit that satisfies the previous condition. Getting your core fintech provider to integrate new tech “behind the PIN” of your authenticated portals is another challenge and often a significant roadblock. The mission-critical nature of their platforms makes fintech providers eager to avoid jeopardizing their platforms with unproven technology. That leaves customers like you with potentially costly delays or dead ends caused by painful ticketing queues, extended compatibility testing, and unclear ownership when questions and issues arise.
You can make your life much easier by working with a customer-centric interaction vendor with the relationships, expertise, and field-proven, ready-to-deploy fintech integrations to expedite and simplify successful deployments and reduce risk.
Time and Effort Before and After Launch
Assuming you clear the hurdles mentioned above, do your diligence to understand the time and effort it will take for implementation, training, and ongoing administration. Make sure your vendor is willing to partner with you and support you throughout the lifetime of your relationship. Beware of solutions that can take many quarters or years to deploy or require excessive involvement from overwhelmed IT and operations teams. You get little value from shelf-ware.
Successfully adding secure digital interaction channels and capabilities like chat, voice, video, visual collaboration, and automation into your public and authenticated digital properties doesn’t have to be painful, drawn-out, or labor-intensive. Nor does bringing your phone call center into the same unified interaction management environment.
A field-proven, ChannelLess™ interaction platform that you can integrate, implement, scale, and manage without dedicated IT resources—supported by success-focused, best practices-driven client services—dramatically reduces implementation time to months or less. This helps drive more immediate and ongoing growth, adoption, and value in line with organizational readiness.
Download “Accelerate Time to Value with Ready-to-Deploy Customer Interaction Solutions” for a deep dive covering topics from ease of deployment and integration to automation and beyond to position you and your organization to excel in the coming year and beyond.
