ARGO’s History of Meeting Needs
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.
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.
Achieving Customer Centricity
A modern customer delivery strategy includes support for each stage of the customer journey. Major cornerstone pillars include proactive automated customer engagement, accommodation for customer fulfillment and abandonment recovery, Omni-channel workflow for improved customer service and operational efficiency, risk detection and mitigation capability, and management insight KPIs for excellence in execution and continual improvement. Such a model uses data as a major bank asset for data-driven automated decisioning.
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
Institutions can ‘listen’ to their customers through digital channels utilizing four pillars of listening capability which include:
- Sensory listening detectors: Detecting and interpreting customer needs based on digital behavior
- Personal financial planning: Obtaining self-disclosed information related to customer needs through Accumulator, our goal-centric personal financial planning tool
- Questionnaires: Asking a single question or posing a series of related survey questions to obtain direct feedback
- 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.
Successful digital marketing detects a customer’s presence and analyzes intentions based on website navigation and length of stay to deploy cost-effective and highly engaging campaigns, ultimately driving value for both the organization and the consumers. Our solution accomplishes this by measuring consumer signal strength to quantify intent and propensity-to-purchase in the awareness and consideration customer journey stages. It gathers user identity information via digital sensory and prompted self-disclosure, saving it as customer relationship management prospect data.
In the short run, topics such as cash flow, expenditure management, and goal achievement offer many opportunities for engagement. Ongoing dialogue captures and capitalizes on additional information to improve engagement relevance. With knowledge of how a customer is progressing to goal achievement, bankers have an organic opportunity to assist customers along the journey of fulfilling longer term goals such as freedom from debt, homeownership, and wealth expansion. In the long run, engagement opportunities include areas such as pre-wealth management, risk mitigation, and diversification.
Customer satisfaction has moved from a subjective topic to a scientifically studied field resulting in a list of specific satisfiers and dissatisfiers. Banks achieve enhanced customer experience in this new digital model by listening to their customers with the goal of improving customer satisfiers and eliminating dissatisfiers. We achieve this by taking a customer-centric approach and listening through both human and digital channels.
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:
- A frictionless Omni-channel experience
- Relevant engagement and personalization
- Guidance with financial wellness
- Empowerment
- Enhanced security and trust
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.
A successful solution helps the institution by delivering frictionless navigation with start-stop-resume Omni-channel functionality. Omni-workflow routes requests through automated and human channels, appropriately balancing customer demands for convenient self-service and human assistance. Issue detection and intervention demonstrate attentiveness and reduce customer frustration. In the event that digital sensory detects abandonment, it responds with a personalized retargeting campaign intended to assist the prospect through the online fulfillment process.
Expanding Omni-Channel Delivery
Improving Customer Acquisition
To ensure cost-effective and optimal use of resources, decisioning routes prospects through human or automated engagement based on information gathered. Decisioning analytics use configurable thresholds for quality and qualification to automatically determine prospect routing to contact center or branch staff for phone or email follow up, or utilize automated engagement which may be more appropriate for lower quality but high intent opportunities.
Successful digital marketing:
- Detects a customer’s presence and analyzes intentions based on website navigation and length of stay
- Identifies the customer utilizing information gathered via digital sensory and prompted self-disclosure
- Quantifies probable interest level based on navigation depth and time-on-page
- Routes the prospect through human or automated engagement based on information gathered using threshold decisioning
- Engages through relevant and targeted campaigns
- Tracks and measures macro key performance metrics such as pipeline conversion rates across customer journey stages
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 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.
Management insight for customer acquisition across channels, media, and methods using digital sensory information begins with the consumer’s initial website contact. Website consumption metrics inform the institution of functional and attractant value from entry to action (first qualification event detected). Consumers are tracked from visitor to lead to an activated prospect. Channel optimization, channel health, consumer return ratio, and page views measure each channel’s ability to drive traffic, maintain contact, attract return visits, and draw consumers to specific product offerings.
Attaining Frictionless Fulfillment
Fulfillment capabilities include ‘accelerators,’ features that help the customer complete the process more easily, including:
- Application prefill from known customer relationship management (CRM) and account data
- Electronic data collection and document upload
- Start-save-resume cross-channel functionality
- Proactive error detection and intervention via automated and human-based resolution methods
- Automated workflow management
- Electronic paperless and e-signature processing
- Multiple funding options
- Automated setup for additional services
Successful digital marketing solutions require digital sensory technology for the detection of customer needs, intent, and propensity-to-purchase based on website navigation and time‑on‑page to engage during the early awareness and consideration stages. With the industry‑high 80 percent abandonment rate, automation and rapid response convert up to 30 percent of these otherwise missed opportunities.
Engaging Customers Efficiently
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
Proactive customer engagement includes the following seven engagement activities:
- Educating consumers on financial wellness
- Scheduling appointments for a callback and personal branch engagement
- Referring to personal bankers and financial planning professionals
- Offering appropriate products and services
- Following up on feedback
- Nudging customers with reminders
- Notifying customers of relevant information such as changes in terms
Typical static questionnaires ask the customer a series of questions without respect to their answers along the way. Intelligent interactive questionnaires use the response to each question to determine the most relevant next question. The question and answer framework presents itself to a customer in a naturally conversational way, making the customer feel like the survey is listening and responding in an intelligent dialog.
Intelligent campaigns improve both pro-active and reactive engagement capability attracting earlier customer and prospect connections throughout the customer journey beginning in the early awareness and consideration stages. Sales campaign capability deploys relevant content to target audiences, tracks responses, and provides management insight visualization. Campaign functionality drives success focused on optimizing cost-effective customer engagement through a six pillar strategy:
- Message relevance
- Target audience selection
- Distribution breadth
- Calls-to-action
- Customer follow-up
- Management insight KPI metrics
Digital behavioral sensory tracking supports customer engagement throughout the customer journey. Various signal strengths trigger different engagement responses. Our decision engine analyzes customer behavior and intent, and combined with our customer relationship management knowledge of the customer, initiates the most appropriate and relevant engagement plan.
Improving Insight and Decisioning Through Analytics
As consumer preferences include increased digital engagement, the opportunity for using analytics increases. Bringing data, analytics, and intelligent decisioning together achieves quantifiable benefits including:
- Improved customer experience
- Identified customer opportunity
- Improved decision consistency
- Identified and quantified risk
- Enriched insights
Digital economy lending creditworthiness is statistically less than a traditional delivery model, with anywhere from 50 percent to as many as 90 percent of credit requests not being viable credit opportunities. Employing analytics to process digital loan applications through five levels of decisioning before assigning them to human capital for intervention minimizes labor and vendor cost, mitigates credit risk, strengthens customer engagement, and ensures regulatory compliance.
Analytics and intelligent decision management become vital components when creating a business model that reaches a digitally engaged customer because they reduce cost, improve customer engagements through personalization, detect risk, identify revenue potential, and improve operational efficiency. Decision analytics optimize operations management in the areas of:
- Service level and response
- Deposit operations
- Lending operations
- Fulfillment processing
- SLA monitoring and reporting
- Exception tracking
Obtaining Reliability and Sustainability
A successful Omni-delivery solution requires substantial innovative technology functionality. For it to be comprehensive, it must include technology support for transactional elements, data management, multiple channels and devices, Omni-channel workflow, analytics, and full digital capability. From an operational perspective, it must scale, have performance capability, include longer‑term maintainability, and support mission-critical operational reliability.
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 65 percent of potential outages before they occur. As a result, our customers achieved 99.984 percent operational reliability and resilience on ARGO servers in 2019. Our years of production results in the customer environment have demonstrated solution sustainability.
Reimagining the Role of the Branch
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.
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 digital marketing, 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.
In an Omni-delivery ecosystem, the role of the banker transitioned from primarily transactional to expanded customer care through meeting immediate and long-term needs. Book of business, performance metrics, and pipeline forecasting enhance customer care by maintaining staff accountability for customer relationships.
Mitigating Risk in an Omni Environment
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
Studies reveal that only one in 26 customers share frustrations with an institution before they leave. The bank can employ technology to proactively detect and analyze more than 85 events and trends impacting customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. That technology aggregates data including issue severity, timeframe, and impact on the overall relationship to calculate a predictive attrition risk score quantifying the likelihood that a customer will leave the bank. When this score reaches a configurable threshold, the solution initiates appropriate and relevant customer engagement plans based on customer segmentation and preferences to remediate attrition risk.
Processing digital loan applications through automated decisioning before assigning them to human capital for intervention minimizes labor and vendor cost, mitigates credit risk, strengthens customer engagement, and ensures regulatory compliance. The five layers of automated decisioning include:
- Data quality for field-level controls, address normalizations, and user-guided content
- Pre-bureau checks for known internal fraud and charge-offs, OFAC, and geographic misalignment
- Post-bureau checks for thin credit files, derogatory credit, bankruptcies, garnishments, legal proceedings, foreclosures, repossessions, and fraud flags
- Automated underwriting for credit scoring, debt to income analysis, compliant calculations, and business rule and policy evaluations using the decision and rules engine
- Market segment, relationship, and promotion for workflow routing targeted offers, and special pricing
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:
- Provide timely solution updates to meet current rules and regulations
- Adhere to all applicable rules and policies
- Control and enforce adherence to existing regulations
- 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.
