In this blog, we’ll explore how banks can quickly modernize to a cloud-based customer communication management (CCM) system — or Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) —that leverages the power of AI to enhance the user and end-customer experience across the entire customer journey.
Customer Communication Challenges Facing Banks Today
Today’s regional and large banks face mounting challenges in onboarding, retaining, and growing customer accounts. With more choices from fintechs and digital-native banks, customers expect more personalized services, proactive financial guidance, and faster access to documentation and information. Simultaneously, banks must manage data and application sprawl, comply with ever-changing regulations, secure sensitive information, and deliver consistent communications across multiple channels, both physical and digital. And understanding each customer’s preferred engagement method is crucial for enhancing customer experience and maximizing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
By fostering personalized interactions and growing trust through secure and tailored communications, banks can build long-term relationships and create new business opportunities. When customers feel valued by their bank, they’re more likely to trust that institution with other aspects of their financial life. This is a key factor in motivating customers to consolidate their banking needs, therefore increasing a financial institution’s share of wallet.
The Role of Customer Communication Management (CCM) Systems
Nearly every bank employs multiple solutions to handle customer communications management (CCM), whether purchased or developed in-house. These systems support banks in designing, creating, and delivering vast amounts of automated critical communications daily, such as account statements, onboarding materials, loan documents, compliance notifications, customer service interactions, security alerts, and marketing campaigns.
The Limitations of Legacy CCM Systems
However, many banks are discovering that their legacy customer communication platform in their data center lacks the agility, scalability, and security needed to incorporate modern features and capabilities such as AI, analytics, journey management, sentiment analysis, regulatory compliance, and automation of document creation/delivery. According to IDC, 42% of business leaders plan to invest in CCM technologies to attract new customers and enhance business operations.
The Cloud Solution: Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS)
The somewhat obvious, yet elusive, answer is migrating to a cloud solution. With a modern cloud-based communication platform, banks forego the overhead of supporting an additional system, including its hardware, infrastructure, security, and maintenance requirements. Instead, banks can offload these requirements with SaaS and quickly scale the communication platform to meet performance demands during peak transaction times, recover from outages, adapt to new regulatory requirements, and deliver hyper-personalized communications consistently and cost-effectively across all channels. This transition will reduce the bank’s operational costs, freeing up IT teams to focus on innovation. But while the destination is clear, the journey is often challenging.
Addressing Key Challenges of Software Migrations with AI
Software migrations are notorious for being slow, costly, and risky. But what if AI could help solve this migration challenge? We think of generative AI as natural language processing for tools such as ChatGPT, but AI technology also offers value in facilitating smoother transitions from legacy on-premises software to cloud-based models.
Quadient Inspire has an AI tool to help with a smooth and easy transition – InspireXpress –enabling banks to quickly realize the value of AI-powered customer communications management.
This video quickly explains how Inspire Evolve helps banks modernize on the cloud with AI. Migration is accelerated and customer communication is optimized.
Extending the Power of AI to Customer Communications
Inspire Evolve, a cloud-based CCM, unifies and coordinates across data sources, connected systems, and communications channels – creating a scalable and agile foundation for AI-driven optimization of customer communications. Its user-friendly interface and features help map customer journeys, design and personalize
communications, generate documentation, automate workflows, and deliver and archive communications. Furthermore, the Inspire Evolve solution removes the limitations of on-prem deployments while futureproofing the bank with scalability, agility, and continuous compliance with changing regulations through automatic updates that place no additional burden on IT resources.
The AI-assistant in Inspire Evolve is not designed to replace or circumvent the critical human touch of customer engagement. With AI-powered features including template creation, translation, sentiment analysis, message optimization, and prompt creation, Evolve integrates with the bank’s existing AI systems to enhance the content creation process. It acts as a powerful tool for content generation and checking, responding to prompts provided by content authors.
Inspire Evolve’s AI technology suggests responses and ideas based on the given input, helping to ensure that messaging is aligned with the bank’s tone, policies, and regulatory standards. The final communication is always under human control, with AI providing a support system to make decisions faster and more accurate. This significantly improves the financial institution's ability to adhere to compliance requirements, while increasing efficiency, reducing operational costs, and freeing up employees to focus on more complex tasks.
Adopting, or migrating to a cloud-based platform, powered by AI, banks will find themselves relieved of the weight of legacy on-prem IT management challenges, and at the starting line of a race where they have a significant competitive advantage.
The Competitive Advantage of Cloud-Based CCM
As customer experience remains a top priority for banking CEOs, transitioning to cloud with the help of AI provides the best path to enhanced personalization, reliable service delivery, increased scale and agility, and higher operational efficiency that banks need to retain their competitive advantage.