Frequently Asked Questions

Human integration in an Omni-delivery model becomes a major pillar of a successful customer delivery strategy. Integration means ‘seamlessly embedded’ and is much different than a stand-alone model. Success requires transformation. This model starts with having a universal desktop allowing authorized employees to perform any function in a branch, including sales, monetary, fulfillment, and service. The customer gains access to human services that are fully integrated with the digital solution.

Insight for customer acquisition across channels, media, and methods begins with the consumer’s first website contact.  Website usage metrics inform the institution of functional and attractant value from entry to the first action detected.  Consumers are tracked from visitor to lead to activated prospect.  Channel optimization and health, return ratio, and page views measure the ability to drive traffic, maintain contact, attract return visits, and draw consumers to specific products.

Analytics and decisioning are key to a business model that reaches a digitally engaged customer. They reduce cost, personalize engagement, detect risk, identify revenue potential, and improve efficiency. Decision analytics streamline operations in the areas of:

• Service level and response
• Deposit and lending fulfillment
• SLA monitoring
• Exception tracking

First, the process must be time-sensitive, preferably in the five to eight minute range from start to completion. Second, the user interface (UI) must be designed for self-service use. Third, instead of expecting data entry perfection, it must accept partially‑completed applications, place them in a work queue, and have employees assist in completion. These methods reduce abandonment probability and increase fulfillment success.

Digital behavior tracking bolsters engagement throughout the customer journey. The decision engine analyzes this behavior to interpret intent. Signal strength combined with what is known about the customer triggers the most relevant engagement plan. Success metrics can then be used to optimize outcomes over time.

Modernization of the financial institution’s branch assets is needed to provide customer value beyond transactional services to providing guidance and education as well as meeting needs related to major life events. When automated decision criteria exceed institution-defined thresholds, prioritization and routing assign customer action accountability to human resources. This ‘awareness sensitivity’ detection escalates events, resulting in customer outreach by branch or contact center staff. Such capability exists across customer journey stages within lead generation, customer engagement, fulfillment, and servicing events. It also applies to processes such as risk management, fraud prevention, and data aging and expiration detection. This capability increases the institution’s human resource focus on the customer experience.

When you look at dozens of studies, including those of survey companies such as J.D. Powers and the major consulting firms, you find a list of what customers want across five categories:

1. A frictionless Omni-channel experience
2. Relevant engagement and personalization
3. Guidance with financial wellness
4. Empowerment
5. Enhanced security and trust

Processing loan applications through automated decisioning before assigning them to staff reduces labor, mitigates credit risk, strengthens engagement, and ensures compliance.

The five layers of decisioning include:

1. Data quality for field-level controls, address normalization, and user-guided content
2. Pre-bureau checks for known internal fraud and charge-offs, OFAC, and geographic misalignment
3. Post-bureau checks for thin credit files, derogatory credit, bankruptcies, garnishments, legal proceedings, foreclosures, repossessions, and fraud flags
4. Automated underwriting for credit scoring, debt-to-income analysis, compliant calculations, and business rules evaluation
5. Market segment and relationship for workflow routing

Financial institutions face increased complexity with their business customers compared to their consumers. Business customers range in size and structure, requiring more complex processing, needs handling, specialized products, and risk management. A successful Omni-delivery solution scales to meet these needs, balancing automation with the human touch.

Banks meet these challenges through:

• Expanded customer segmentation for timely and relevant engagement
• Enhanced deposit services including monetary processing functionality for currency handling, night deposit,  and declared value deposits
• Automated credit workflow to meet the needs of complex business models and deal structures
• Strengthened risk management with robust positive pay and fraud prevention

Successful intelligent lead generation:

1. Detects a customer’s presence and analyzes intentions based on website navigation and length of stay
2. Quantifies probable interest level based on navigation depth and time-on-page
3. Responds through relevant and targeted campaigns
4. Measures macro key performance metrics such as pipeline conversion rates across customer journey stages

A successful Omni-delivery solution requires innovative technology and functionality. For it to be comprehensive, it must include the following:

• Transactional support
• Data management
• Digital capabilities
• Multiple channels and devices
• Omni-channel workflow
• Analytics

From an operational perspective, it must scale and include the following:

• High performance
• Longer‑term maintainability
• Mission-critical operational reliability

As digital engagement increases, so does the opportunity to use analytics to identify and meet needs. Bringing data, analytics, and decisioning together achieves the following quantifiable benefits:

• Improved customer experience
• Identified opportunities
• Increased decision consistency
• Reduced risk
• Enriched insights

Proactive customer engagement includes the following seven activities:

1. Educate consumers on financial wellness
2. Schedule appointments for a callback and personal branch contact
3. Refer to personal bankers and financial planning specialists
4. Offer the most appropriate products and services
5. Follow up on feedback
6. Nudge with reminders
7. Notify customers of relevant information and events such as changes in terms

Our subject matter teams have studied customer satisfaction as it relates to customer experience for decades. We want to know two things: one, what are the antecedents of customer centricity, and two, what are quantifiable outcomes, the consequences of a customer-centric delivery model. Our research tells us we must create customer centricity around seven principles where we can link customer centricity to business performance:

• Needs
• Engagement
• How we treat customers
• Issue detection and resolution
• Reliability and consistency
• Feedback
• Value-driven decisions and actions

Technology can demonstrate empathy through embedded ‘listening posts’ in six functional areas:

1. Website sensory
2. Customer engagement responses
3. Personal self-service financial planning
4. Omni-channel fulfillment
5. Staff interaction
6. Attrition risk mitigation

Technology-driven listening and response methods improve customer centricity through a six pillar strategy. Three pillars listen to customer needs:
1. Know basic needs
2. Detect specific needs
3. Ask direct questions
Three additional pillars respond to needs:
4. Suggest solutions
5. Teach consumers
6. Anticipate future needs

A modern customer delivery strategy includes support for each stage of the customer journey. Success pillars include:

• Proactive automated engagement
• Frictionless fulfillment and abandonment recovery
• Omni-channel workflow to improve service and efficiency
• Risk detection and mitigation
• Management insight for continual improvement

Such a model uses data as a key bank asset for data-driven automated decisioning.

A bank can reduce fulfillment friction with ‘accelerators’ that help the customer complete the process more easily. These include:

• Application prefill from known customer and account data
• Electronic data collection and document upload
• The ability to start, save, and resume across channels
• Proactive error detection and resolution using automated and human methods
• Automated workflow management
• Electronic paperless and e-signature processing
• Multiple funding options
• Automated setup for additional services

With robust technology, institutions can originate, underwrite, process, and close secured and unsecured credit cards, lines of credit, and installment loans in an Omni-channel world. The solution recommends products and pricing using decisioning analytics to evaluate areas such as credit quality, borrower stability, and collateral risk. It applies industry standards, institution-specific rules and policies, and credit report analysis for automated decision support. It enforces compliance and business rules while balancing flexibility and proof of process for manual overrides. Benefits include:

• Increased efficiency
• Revenue lift
• Improved customer experience
• Strengthened governance
• Improved risk management
• Regulatory compliance

Studies show that only one in 26 customers share their frustrations with an institution before they leave. The bank can employ technology to detect and analyze more than 85 events and trends impacting customer satisfaction. That technology can aggregate data, including issue severity, timeframe, and impact on the overall relationship. It calculates a predictive attrition risk score to quantify the likelihood that a customer will leave the bank. When this score reaches a threshold, the solution initiates relevant engagement plans based on customer segment and preferences to remediate attrition risk.

Technology and predictive analytics open new opportunities to engage throughout the customer journey. Engaging customers in the early stages of awareness and consideration is key. Digital sensory tracks website navigation and time on page to detect needs, intent, and purchase propensity. Using this, intelligent lead generation can engage at the right time in these early stages.

Customer satisfaction has moved from a subjective topic to a scientifically studied field. The result is a list of factors that affect satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Banks can enhance the customer’s experience by listening with the goal of improving the satisfiers and reducing or eliminating the causes or dissatisfaction.  They achieve this by taking a customer-centric approach and listening through both human and digital channels.

To ensure cost-effective use of resources, decisioning routes prospects through human or automated engagement based on information gathered and derived about the prospect. Automation may be more appropriate for lower quality but high-intent opportunities. Branch or contact center staff may engage through phone or email for more complex opportunities requiring a human touch.

There are three ways to increase customer acquisition success beyond the initial website touch:

1. Detect, quantify, and respond to prospects earlier in the customer journey
2. Reshape customer experience
3. Expand data‑driven management with intelligent lead generation metrics to quantify success and failure across the website

This approach helps the marketing team improve in weak areas and expand areas of lead generation strength.

An institution can help customers with a solution that provides frictionless navigation and start, stop, and resume Omni-channel functionality. It can balance the demand for self-service and the human touch with workflow that routes requests through digital and staff channels. Issue detection and intervention demonstrate care and reduce frustration. If digital sensory detects an abandoned session, personalized retargeting helps the prospect complete the process. Attention to these and other customer experience factors can help the bank or credit union compete in a digital world.

The institution can filter loan applications through five levels of automated decisioning to remove those that are unqualified. The remaining applications can then be assigned to staff. This results in minimized labor, reduced credit risk, strengthened engagement, and regulatory compliance.

Static questionnaires ask a series of questions without respect to prior answers. Intelligent questionnaires use the response to each question to determine the best and most relevant next question. The question-and-answer framework presents itself in a natural and conversational way. This makes the customer feel like the survey is listening and responding in an intelligent dialog.

The institution can achieve this with a solution that quantifies and predicts customer risk with an array of progressively stricter best practices aligned to the delivery channel to:

• Identify implicit and explicit prospects
• Authenticate customers using the latest security standards
• Verify customers using available data sources to ensure they are who they say they are
• Enforce due diligence and Know Your Customer (KYC) policies and procedures
• Improve data quality through hygiene, composition, and reasonableness testing
• Measure risk and adjudicate potential fraudulent activities based on weighted parameters for:
  • Intrinsic Entity Risk – doing business with the person, business, or entity
  • Geography Risk – where the transaction or entity is located and transacting business
  • Product and Services Transactional Risk – based on the type of product or service being requested

There are five areas of technology and analytics that can anticipate and meet customer needs:

1. Needs identification
2. Quantification
3. Decisioning technology
4. Engagement actions
5. Customer knowledge base

An updated credit underwriting model is needed to manage credit processing costs. Automated decisioning through a multi-stage application process filters out low-quality opportunities from those with more suitable creditworthiness. Analytics can achieve this based on factors such as credit grade, geography, and identified fraudulent intent.  Workflow can then assign qualified applicants to staff.

These increases in efficiency result in hard benefits:

• Minimized labor
• Mitigates credit risk
• Strengthens engagement
• Compliance

Today’s consumer diversity has increased in a digital environment. The U.S. has five distinct market segments varying widely by age, income, asset value, and channel use preferences.  Regardless of this diversity challenge, consumers value personalization and demand that engagement content be relevant. With critical purchasing power shifting to Millennials and Gen Z consumers, segmentation cannot be ignored.

In the short run, topics such as cash flow, spending, and goals offer many opportunities for engagement. In the long run, engagement may include areas such as pre-wealth management, risk mitigation, and diversification. The ongoing dialogue builds information to improve engagement relevance. With knowledge of how a customer is progressing toward meeting their goals, bankers have an organic opportunity to help them along the journey of fulfilling longer-term goals such as freedom from debt, homeownership, and wealth expansion.

Our Early Detection Monitoring Services staff monitors over 250 operational KPIs, far deeper than generic data center monitoring tools. Because of this depth, we predict 67 percent of potential outages before they occur. As a result, our customers achieved 99.994 percent operational reliability and resilience on ARGO servers. Our years of production results in the customer environment have demonstrated solution sustainability.

Intelligent lead generation detects a prospect’s presence and analyzes intentions based on website navigation and length of stay. Using this information, it deploys cost-effective and engaging campaigns, driving value for both the organization and the consumer. Our solution measures consumer signal strength to quantify intent and propensity-to-purchase in the awareness and consideration stages of the customer journey. It gathers user information through digital sensory and prompted self-disclosure, saving it as prospect data.

Institutions can ‘listen’ to their customers through digital channels utilizing four pillars of listening capability which include:

1. Sensory listening detectors: Detecting and interpreting customer needs based on digital behavior
2. Personal financial planning: Obtaining self-disclosed information related to customer needs through Accumulator, our goal-centric personal financial planning tool
3. Questionnaires: Asking a single question or posing a series of related survey questions to obtain direct feedback
4. Customer help requests: Receiving user input from digital tools such as Chat or clicks on FAQs or Help links, and engaging when a need is detected.

While customer preference shifts to digital self-service, research shows that most consumers also highly value the human touch. A fully integrated Omni approach includes both automation and reconsidering the role of the branch and contact center. Automation augments staff success through enhanced productivity:

• Control for sales goal distribution and management at all levels of the institution
• Increased accountability through Book of Business and referral management
• Contact, event, and workflow tracking to avoid missed opportunities and SLA slippage
• Management insight for improving outcomes over time

Lenders can serve a full range of business applicants, serving individuals and business entities with multiple signers and guarantors. They can serve sole proprietors as well as private and public entities. The wide range of entity types served includes:

• Associations
• Cooperatives
• Estates
• Business trusts
• Sole proprietors
• Partnerships
• Corporations
• Financial institutions
• Domestic government units

Our customer’s investment is sacred to us, and ensuring long-term sustainable value with a well-maintained solution is key. This is why we have a longer-term perspective. Our primary focus is not on ARGO’s quarterly profits but rather on innovation value for our customers, and heavy R&D investment back into the business helps us achieve our goal.

Digital lending creditworthiness is less than through traditional channels, with between 50 and 90 percent of requests not being viable opportunities. Using analytics to process loan applications through five levels of decisioning before assigning them to staff provides the following benefits:

• Minimized labor
• Reduced credit risk
• Strengthened engagement
• Regulatory compliance

Consumers utilizing the goal-centric financial planning tool establish a unique financial plan and determine how best to achieve their goals. Comparing their expenditures to national averages communicates a sense of what is normal and permits customers to consider the way they spend and the habits of their peers. The solution uses data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics for expense comparisons and the Federal Reserve Bulletin to compare income data. Social influences such as peer comparisons provide meaningful methods of encouraging behavior changes. In under 15 minutes, the customer identifies goals and enters relevant data. From this, they get a picture of where they stand and how to meet their goals and achieve success.

We combine ARGO’s innovative technology strength, our stellar balance sheet, and our industry content leadership. We always have a bias on investing preference where we have depth of innovation infrastructure. Then, we assess the business gains we think we can achieve for our bank customers. We prove we can bring significant value add before we invest and commit.

Intelligent campaigns improve both pro-active and reactive engagement. They attract earlier connections throughout the customer journey starting in the early awareness and consideration stages. Sales campaigns deploy relevant content to target audiences, track responses, and provide management insight. Campaigns optimize cost-effective engagement through a six-pillar strategy:

1. Message relevance
2. Target audience selection
3. Distribution breadth
4. Calls-to-action
5. Customer follow-up
6. Management insight KPI metrics

Financial institutions require a solution that meets their obligation to comply with all applicable rules, regulations, and related guidance. Our customers expect the solution to:

1. Provide timely solution updates to meet current rules and regulations
2. Adhere to all applicable rules and policies
3. Control and enforce adherence to existing regulations
4. Provide proof for audit purposes

We provide the institution with regulatory support through a combination of decision analytics, data quality, data source, configuration, policy, rules, process management, and compliance expertise.

Intelligent lead generation requires digital sensory technology to detect and measure needs and propensity to purchase. Website navigation and time on page drive relevant and timely engagement during the early awareness and consideration stages.

With abandonment rates as high as 80 percent, a rapid response can convert up to 30 percent of these lost opportunities. Using the information gathered about needs, prospects can be quickly re-engaged with targeted content.

As a branch’s transactional role diminishes, its customer service and advisory roles increase. For example, branch and contact center personnel play a significant role in customer acquisition, clarifying options, and offering guidance and assistance. They also focus personal engagement on serving broader and more complex needs that require a consultative approach.