‘In a digitalised environment, the focus is on creating personal experiences for consumers’

As consumers turn to digital or self-service channels to complete everyday tasks and transactions, financial institutions are transforming their branch networks to reshape the customer experience. ATMs, which remain central to a cash economy, are also creating personal experiences.

“Making consumers feel valued is one of the universal drivers of customer experience and customer loyalty, and it is particularly important in the financial industry,” Jaivinder Singh Gill, Managing Director-South Asia and Vice-President Operations-Asia Pacific at Diebold Nixdorf, told BusinessLine .

Diebold Nixdorf drives connected commerce through its ATM and retail PoS offerings and provides digital services to the banking and retail sectors.

Beyond facilitating monetary transactions, financial instruments are providing services that are not only needed and relevant, but also thoughtful and personal, adds the official. Given that the industry is undergoing a rapid transformation, the proliferation of devices, changing demographics, and the imperative for innovation are all leading to the emergence of a new class of customers.

Pointing out that the preferred channel today for majority of consumers is increasingly a mix of digital and physical options, Gill says consumers tend to move seamlessly between physical and digital channels and “the solutions must facilitate that journey securely and just as seamlessly, so that each interaction becomes a positive experience, rather than a standard transaction”.

While the personal relationship between a financial institution and its customers has always been the cornerstone of the retail branch experience, Gill points out, “it has been challenging to deliver this in the self-service channel (like an ATM). There are solutions available today which enable a financial institution to not only engage consumers with targeted information, but enable opportunities for new types of engagement with multiple channels”.

The official elaborates that some solutions can create a more tailored, intuitive and impactful consumer experience with every single self-service transaction. Like enabling a unified and highly personalised consumer experience across various channels, “with a robust middleware that connects the self-service network with consumers’ smartphones, computers, and tablets more seamlessly and in real-time”.

Reaching out to customers, “who are no longer engaging with tellers for their transactional banking, as well as non-customers who are using the banks’ ATM” is another option, as is offering video teller capabilities and advanced self-service operations, points out Gill, adding that delivering great customer experiences will, in turn, create loyal customers.

Given the increasingly digitalised environment, the focus is on creating personal experiences for consumers. “This is most important since in this age of high disruption of models, it is the personal connections with the consumer that matters the most for an organisation in order to retain and grow,” he adds.

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