The Experience Edge

IndusInd Bank upgrades its customer experience management system to better its services and enhance the customer experience.

Till 2009, IndusInd Bank was using Talisma Customer Experience Management system (CEM) that was good enough for use by 40-50 contact centre agents. The system existed, but could never be exploited to its fullest.

First among the new private banks to have begun operations in 1994, IndusInd Bank today has a wide network of branches, extension counters and ATMs. Along with this exponential network expansion across the country, the bank needed to relook at its communication strategy to keep the business growing.

To retain high volume of customers, it also needed to innovate with new revenue streams, increase wallet share of existing customers, and offer personalised customer service. This could be done only through allowing customer interactions across channels, therefore they needed a solution to standardise processes for branch operations, and enable tracking of interactions across silos in the organisation. This would in turn, help sales and services teams to be more consistent and proactive on cross-selling and up-selling.

Mridul Sharma, EVP – Head Solution Delivery, IndusInd Bank, says, “Efforts towards developing the system to manage customer experience at every touch point, began back in 2009 with transforming the existing client server architecture based system into web based.”

He adds that though the bank needed an out-of the box approach to meet the needs of their business, they always thought of ripping off the existing solution and replacing it with the another. “The system was in place, only that it was underutilised, we just needed to upgrade and automate operations to make the system more productive. Opting for a new system did not make economic and operational sense. So, we made the critical upgrades back in 2009 and recently we upgraded to the latest version —Talisma CEM version 9.0,” he explains.

For customers, with care
Sharma adds, “We developed an easy to use, common front-office application that would integrate financial and non-financial data from multiple back-office systems and offer a complete view of the customers, which the previous system was incapable of doing.”

The new system would help manage multi-channel interactions across departments – contact centre, sales, branches and back-offices. The system would not only help the bank serve its customers and employees better, but also empower the various teams working internally. This would require integration of data from different sources for providing customer insight.

“The system needed to be highly customised to the requirements of the bank. In fact, the latest system has been customised to an extent that it can handle about 9,000 different queries,” says Sharma, and all the processes have been automated, for example, if a customer puts in a request for change of address online, the request is archived and automatically escalated to the concerned department.

Since all the customer interactions are recorded, and the entire history of past interactions can be accessed through the CEM system, the service process becomes agent-independent. Any agent handling a customer query can access the history through the system easily and respond much faster and more effectively.

Besides, the CEM system also keeps track of the time taken to respond to each query. This information is vital to alert agents of their deadlines. End-of-day reports enlist number of unanswered emails, classified by type. This way, the bank is able to keep track of all communication activities and plan more customised responses.

According to Sharma, the best thing about the CEM solution is that the client marketing team can send out targeted emails without much help from the IT Department, enabling the bank to send out timely information to the desired set of targets.

Sharma says, “The bank uses Talisma as a customer facing experiential solution as well as an internal collaboration tool within the organisation. Through this relationship, the bank has been able to not only better engage the customers, but also enhance back-office productivity. This in turn has helped increase upsell and cross-sell opportunities and greater customer retention

“Also, everything automated, leads to a paperless environment along with single pane visibility of all operations,” Sharma adds.

Usability is the key
The installation of the updated system was completed in a very short period, what Sharma thinks took longer was making the users comfortable with the new system.. “The system was easily integrated with existing system and also the core banking system. Now we essentially have three integrated systems —the customer experience management system, workflow management system and the core banking system,” explains Sharma.

He adds, “It took us about six months to get all the users of the system get acclimatised to the new one and to discipline them to follow the process of entering every detail into the system. This change in the user culture was critical for the success of the solution.”

With experiential banking, Sharma, points out that the bank has already carved a niche for itself in this highly competitive segment in India and will consolidate and strengthen its position as a leading bank in the days to come.

To make the system more effective, the bank has plans to mobile-enable the solution, but that seems to be a matter some time away as Sharma explains that extending the solution will require them to make some essentially changes.

“We have been in talks with Talisma regarding the mobile enablement plans, and still evaluating ways to go about it, we are hopeful that will happen sometime soon,” Sharma concludes.

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