Siloed data and processes create pain points, operational inefficiencies, and risks for most financial services companies and their downstream consumers. With the relentless pace of technological change, businesses must ensure their IT infrastructure and applications are secure, scalable, flexible, and agile. This broadly implies that their technology stack must cater to the ever-changing business requirements, usage patterns, and functionalities.
Financial institutions looking to easily address their customer support needs while ensuring high customer satisfaction are increasingly adopting ServiceNow’s Financial Services Operations (FSO). In an era of real-time, a digital workflow platform like FSO could entirely revolutionize the way financial services organizations operate – thanks to FSO’s ability to reduce costs, incorporate CSM’s capabilities, reduce liability, manage the hybrid workforce, and improve overall customer satisfaction.
In fact, financial services companies that have invested in ServiceNow CSM are now looking to migrate to FSO. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key business advantages of migrating to ServiceNow FSO and how financial institutions can adopt the platform to create an end-to-end digital transformation strategy.
The Many Benefits of FSO
A 2020 PwC report elucidates how banks worldwide struggle to internally connect a host of disparate systems to create a cohesive customer experience – a situation that inhibits the idea of making decisions at the customer level.
This reality is indicative of the fragmented IT landscape that financial institutions grapple with. However, FSO’s adoption introduces standardization across every touchpoint, making it an ideal platform for financial institutions to create a truly unified digital strategy and improve operational resilience. Here’s why financial organizations must adopt FSO:
Automation of Core Operational Processes
McKinsey & Company’s research reveals that financial institutions can reduce operational costs by 40% via process automation. However, often under the hood of manual processes, the financial sector tends to harbor a lot of headaches – from cross-department inefficiencies to slow and tedious workflows.
FSO resolves these issues by automating repetitive core processes, including approvals, payments, and transactions, etc. The idea is to equip the departments with a massive suite of functionalities so that the most appropriate person for the job is notified and entailed to act.
Favorably, the automation capabilities span across key FSO applications, including the Financial Services Payment Operations and Financial Services Card Operations. As a result, everything associated with inquiries, claims, debits, and credits can essentially be automated.
High-grade Customer Experience
Financial institutions with large customer bases and retail locations are constantly exposed to greater pressure for customer satisfaction. Remote working entailed by the COVID-19 pandemic has further complicated matters by making it imperative to go the extra mile alongside taking care of the hybrid workforce. ServiceNow FSO has been explicitly designed to support financial organizations that wish to deliver high-quality customer experiences across all touchpoints. It does so by rendering a transparent view of organizational offerings and alerting the customers about service-related issues.
Digitized Workflows
Creating custom workflows can be daunting, especially to financial institutions that must adhere to tight deadlines. With this in mind, FSO allows for digitalized workflows that can be easily followed by agents via an intuitive and user-friendly interface.
For instance, the loan operations constitute pre-built digitized workflows that streamline the requests and document them for preventing redundancies. Likewise, the card operations feature a workflow for distinct service request types, with all of them routing cases to the most appropriate person.
And while these workflows entirely eliminate the need to manually define the process, they can be further advanced by embedding real-time controls (if needed) to reduce the risks of compliance issues surfacing.
What is involved in the migration from CSM to FSO?
For end-to-end digital transformation, including customer service operations, a thorough migration plan is paramount. Nevertheless, an organization can choose to migrate from CSM to FSO via a staged approach. Ideally, this will reduce the risk of failure and also allow the teams to evaluate if a migration is even feasible in the first place.
That said, let’s dive deeper into the various aspects that need detailed attention during the migration –
User Experience
User experience is an essential component of a financial institution’s digital transformation strategy. While migrating from CSM to FSO, organizations need to ensure that the front-end user experiences have the same look and feel as the current CSM implementation. Not only does this keep the UI streamlined, but it also allows for users to commence hassle-free working from day one. Of course, the change to FSO with respect to user experience would depend on the level of intricacy of the current UI and the number of customizations required to realize the desired functionality – something that Xceltrait can help evaluate, plan, and implement.
Custom Workflows and Case Data Structure
While FSO offers several ready workflows, it is fair to assume that as someone using CSM, organizations would have several custom workflows as per the specific needs of the business and teams. While leveraging the power of the readymade workflows, organizations need to be careful and sensitive to the fact that the new FSO implementation should have the same workflows and processes. Again, the idea is to maintain the workflows and work patterns to ensure that the already excellent experience facilitated by CSM remains unaltered. And this is precisely what we, at Xceltrait, have been tuning into with respect to FSO’s adoption in the financial sector.
Apart from the workflows, it is also critical to ensure that the case data structure is maintained as is. Only then the case history and all other required details will be seamlessly migrated – allowing a smooth transition for the customer support teams.
Maintenance
In general, servicing the core banking and payment systems can be an uphill task. However, by leveraging the core functionality and Out-of-box features of FSO, financial services companies can reduce the need for additional ongoing maintenance. While migrating from CSM to FSO, it is important to carefully strategize and consider the use of such Out-of-Box features of FSO and enhance the maintainability of the implementation.
Training and Support
It’s one thing to implement a digital solution, but it’s quite another to make sure everyone has the appropriate skill set and knowledge to not only operate the platform but also take advantage of its advanced features.
To make the most of their FSO investments, companies need to provide sufficient detailed training to their teams to help them easily use the new workflows, features, and make the most of value-added changes. A team of experts should be available to guide them through their journey. The feedback shared by the team should be considered and features should be tweaked based on that.
Conclusion
Implementing FSO is a no-brainer for financial institutions. Not only does it reduce cost and effort, but it also gives them the agility that they so badly need to compete with nimble FinTechs. At Xceltrait, we help financial services companies strategize, design, and implement their FSO initiatives. With our proprietary tools and frameworks, we can make the migration from CSM to FSO easy and cost-effective. Let’s connect if the digital transformation of your customer service function is on your plans for the coming year!
