How Cloud Empowers PSU Banks for Innovation and Growth

Banking today is ready for disruption as digital giants – termed fintech – are entering the financial services domain and digitally native private banks are gaining market share. A McKinsey report has found that some traditional institutions are losing ground to digital-commerce firms penetrating the banking sector.

In this environment, the PSU banks still supported by legacy infrastructure must accelerate their transformation if they vie for higher positions in the marketplace.

Such transformation is not merely about building a digital replica of existing organisations. It has to be a thorough reinvention wherein PSU banks turn from product factories to network orchestrators and enable their customers to transact in ways they prefer the most.

To redesign their operational procedures and adopt the qualities of a digital-first organisation, these banks need to focus on:

• Top customer issues, always at the forefront
• Solutions that will not only resolve the said issues but will delight customers
• Provide complementary solutions as part of the customer engagement model

Evidence shows that the cloud is an essential pillar of digital transformation in any industry. Banks aiming to structure their processes around customer experience can leverage it to create value and deliver unique solutions and services. It helps them reimagine the operations modelled around siloed, on-premises setups and organise their data and processes while also becoming more customer-centric.

Ways in which cloud platforms allow banks to unlock new efficiencies

The cloud is commonly perceived as a technology to store information in web-based data centres to circumvent device storage and provide location-agnostic access.

However, the potential of the cloud travels much further: it is a network of on-demand virtual resources that make business IT architectures more agile. Besides offering tailored solutions to specific problems, it strengthens other digital technologies to address multiple challenges in a volatile business environment.

With a suite of cloud-based platforms, Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) helps public sector banks reinvent and streamline their daily tasks, enhance customer experience, boost security, and simplify compliance.

Cloud for communications

Another TTBS product which is being increasingly adopted by businesses – including BFSI players – is Smartflo. Smartflo is a cloud-based contact centre solution which cannot just help banks meet customer expectations but also market their offerings more effectively.

Extended hold times, fractured service delivery, screens that refuse to load and desktops that freeze – these are some of the shortcomings of traditional contact centres. The result is exasperated employees and dissatisfied customers. TTBS addresses all such problems with Smartflo.

Ease of deployment coupled with cost savings

Using web-connected devices to set up contact centre operations, Smartflo is easy to deploy anywhere and gives agents the freedom to work from remote locations at any time. This is a key advantage for banks that need to provide 24*7 services for urgent requests. They can let their employees work from home and eliminate the costs of maintaining physical contact centres and transport facilities.

Focus on context

With an integrated CRM system, this cloud-based contact centre allows for real-time and context-rich communications. It implies that when a call is transferred between departments, it is accompanied by a full background of the interaction and callers do not need to narrate their issue again. The result is less frustration and quicker resolution.

Smarter interactions for quick resolutions

Intelligent call routing is also a time-saving and efficiency-enhancing feature of Smartflo. It directs incoming calls to appropriate resources or pre-recorded messages based on what a customer needs. Banks can route high-volume, low-value calls to AI-enabled responses while enabling agents to offer a humanised value-enhanced service.

Better awareness leading to higher customer satisfaction

TTBS Smartflo comes with sentiment analysis and word-cloud powered analytics to help agents focus on customer expectations and deliver positive outcomes without call escalations. An information-rich screen pops with every call to ensure that agents are supported with details on case history, previous interaction data, purchase history, and recommended actions for quick and successful query resolutions.

Smartflo also has a ‘sticky agent’ feature that directs repeat callers to agents well-versed with their transaction records and can resolve the concern more effectively than their colleagues.

More relevant marketing, cross-sell and up-sell attempts

Besides making the management of incoming calls simpler and more efficient, Smartflo supports PSU banks to revitalise their outbound contact centres. It enables them to deliver personalised services through dedicated relationship managers. They can leverage the available information for each customer to offer suitable cash-backs, shopping discounts, loans, credit cards, ATM card upgrades, and other financial products. These include dossiers such as average account balance, monthly salary credits, spending habits, and investment choices.

Analytics, scalability and enterprise-grade security

When a bank structures its contact centre on Smartflo, it becomes easier to monitor call flows, agent performance, and campaign efficacy. Supervisors get comprehensive reports and insightful analytics to improve business outcomes progressively.

Being a cloud-based solution, Smartflo is easy to scale and equips banks with the flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions.

Built-in security attributes make this contact centre a robust value proposition. Banks have complete control over who can access the system. There are IP restrictions, OTP verification and multifactor authentication strategies to ensure that the web interface is used only by genuine employees. The data is secure with SSL encryption, and thanks to geographically dispersed, redundant servers, an uptime of 99.9% is always assured.

Cloud for data administration

One of the products that PSUs can leverage to reinvent their processes is the Document Management System (DMS). It enables banks to store all their documents concerning operations, customer service, payroll, legal administration, sales and marketing electronically in a unified repository.

Benefits of DMS

From connected data awareness to transparent audits, the merits of DMS go beyond creating paperless offices. It facilitates time and cost savings in file management, improves workflow efficiency, and supports the execution of banks’ regulatory framework while protecting customer data.

By leveraging DMS, the banks can record all their transactions with version control through the entire file lifecycle. This, in turn, makes audits more agile and minimises the chances of errors.

Moving to the cloud: Innovating before a change becomes unavoidable

The pandemic did not influence digital transformation leaders’ priorities more than their more traditional counterparts in the BFSI industry. That was because those leaders were already aware of digital technology’s benefits and could maintain their business resilience when multiple aspects of our life became ‘virtual’. The employees of these companies could quickly switch to flexible and customer-centric work arrangements at the very beginning of the crisis.

If PSU banks aim to augment their competitiveness and unlock innovation before it becomes a necessity, they must understand the cloud’s evident pervasiveness in business and make it their technology enabler.