Boosting Efficiency and Customer Experiences Across the Lifecycle

At a time when convenience is everything and customer loyalty is hard-won, financial institutions like credit unions and community banks are leveraging technology in a number of ways to enhance efficiency and drive customer engagement.

Digital-first strategies are empowering account holders and creating better customer experiences, analytics and AI are enabling smarter, more personalized business decision making, and automation is helping financial institutions to scale more efficiently.

But real transformation comes from bringing all this together into an end-to-end solution that connects every part of the customer journey.

First, let’s take a closer look at those themes.

Digital is key across the customer lifecycle

While digital transformation has taken hold in areas like account opening and loan applications, a truly digital-first approach should provide a full, end-to-end experience and cover the entire customer lifecycle.

Today’s account holders expect to be able to complete all their tasks through digital channels (and the specific ones they so choose) – from uploading documents to signing contracts electronically. For these routine tasks, picking up the phone or visiting a branch is fast becoming a thing of the past.

And they expect the same level of ease and simplicity in other areas, such as loan repayments.

Providing self-service options for delinquent account holders to schedule payments (view related blog), set up and manage payment plans, schedule callbacks, or request assistance is an effective way to not only provide a richer customer experience, but also free up resources so you can focus on supporting more complex cases, providing personalized services, and exploring value-added services.

Automation to help you scale and meet demands

As financial institutions grow and manage an increasing volume of digital account holder engagements, scaling operations can be complex, particularly when headcount cannot be increased to support growth.

Rules-based automation can reduce the load of fulfilment tasks across various business areas. In loan origination, for example, application information can be validated automatically, credit checks triggered, cross-sell offers generated, or incomplete submissions flagged. In collections, payment reminders can be scheduled or delinquent cases routed to other workflows based on set parameters.

Automation also speeds up service delivery, allowing you to do more with the resources you have already and ensuring more senior staff can focus their attention on applications or accounts that require more experience to review. It can also reduce the risk of manual errors, including compliance violations.

And, particularly important during periods of economic volatility, automation can help you to maintain service levels during spikes in demand or delinquencies, without your customer experience being affected or seeing costs suddenly rise elsewhere as a result.

Deeper insights for better decision making

Technology isn’t just helping to improve speed and efficiency. Analytics are helping financial institutions to make smarter, faster decisions across a growing range of functions.

Loan origination remains one of the most common areas where analytics are being applied, helping to assess risk and creditworthiness, assign interest rates, and, ultimately, make loan decisions.

We are seeing this quickly expand into other areas. In collections, for example, data-driven models can predict the likelihood of repayment, prioritize accounts accordingly, and recommend actions – such as payment plans or outreach strategies – based on customer history and account type.

Institutions are also leveraging analytics to suggest relevant or even hyper-personalized products, product bundles, and workflows, which can strengthen customer loyalty and drive cross-sell.

A unified solution for simplicity and value

Even with these technologies available, we know that legacy technology and disconnected systems can create inefficiencies that make it difficult, if not impossible, for many financial institutions to deliver an innovative, consistent service across the account holder lifecycle.

That’s why the real benefit comes from deploying these technologies and approaches on an end-to-end platform.

With account and loan origination, collections, and recovery modules, Temenos Lifecycle Management Suite (LMS) combines advanced digital experiences, rules-based automation, a suite of best-in-class partner integrations, open APIs, and more in a single, comprehensive solution.

With this approach we help our clients to operate more efficiently and deliver an empowering, personalized experience across the account holder lifecycle to foster long-term loyalty and drive business growth.