All hands on tech

Connecting, communicating and collaborating with staff and customers should be a priority for the entire finance sector, but often the emphasis has been placed elsewhere. FST US looks at how new technology is enabling better customer focus and sharper social collaboration.

“I want to pursue multi-channel integration that is equipping them with that complete profile of the client data and their transaction history in a way that can bring more powerful, more differentiated service to the client.”
-Lindsay Soergel

Social collaboration is as old as the hills. We've been working together, collaborating together and discussing together since time immemorial. Without social collaboration, the Egyptian Pyramids would not have been built. Democracy would never have taken shape. Man would have never set foot on the moon and the World Wide Web would have remained the faintly geeky plaything of a certain Sir Tim Berners-Lee as he scuttled away in a dimly-lit back office at Switzerland's CERN laboratories.

Perhaps this is an oversimplification of social collaboration. Certainly, in an enterprise context, social collaboration denotes a relatively new and ostensibly complex movement - centred around technology - that enables businesses to extract more, to know more, to discuss more and to create more. In a financial context, the tools surrounding social collaboration have been designed to modify pre-existing networks, silos, intranets and other classic software platforms to permit them to deliver ever more fluid and organic methods of communication. Such communication can be focused either within an organization (in the form of Facebook-type platforms that employees can use to discuss work-related issues) or externally, utilized to nurture and build stronger relationships with clients and customers. 

Not so simple now, right? Social collaboration (or 'Enterprise 2.0' as it is sometimes called) is an attempt by industry to proactively pre-empt the next phase of customer interaction. The increasing socialization of technology - even the most illiterate of individuals can swipe and smudge their way through the operating system of an iPad with barely a grunt of confusion ­- has created a welter of new challenges for the finance industry. Previously, financial institutions were protected by technology; it shielded them primarily from security risks but also from certain communication and marketing issues too. In the very beginning of banking, customers could only visit their local branch with a query, a question or - heaven forbid - a complaint. Next they had the telephone, but armies of well-drilled call center staff made that option something of a time-consuming minefield for only the most committed/patient/disgruntled of customers.

The Internet upset the balance of power somewhat, affording customers 24-hour access to their bank and its services, but the next evolution is here, and it is becoming increasingly noticeable that banks are no longer content to sit on their hands and react to trends - they are actively seeking ways to develop, engage and pre-empt the whims and wants of their customers. Technology is now, more than ever, an enabler of good customer service, and social collaboration has come about, whether unintentionally or merely ironically, as a result of millions and millions of conversations between bank and customer. We have all collaborated up to this point. But the question now is: what happens next?

Lindsay Soergel is the senior vice president of channel management at SunTrust Banks, Inc., one of the nation's largest financial services holding companies with assets totalling $174.7 billion. FST US caught up with her at the recent FST Summit held San Francisco in October where she revealed that the issue of tackling client interaction through IT initiatives is still often viewed as a secondary concern for many from within the technology industry.

"I was at the introductory meeting of the FST20 on the first day of the conference [the FST20 is a closed-door meeting comprising 20 of the biggest players in the financial technology space] and several of us observed that we hadn't really talked very much about the client," says Soergel. "We had talked a lot about issues such as regulation, which is obviously a huge topic, and we had talked a lot about continuing to drive costs out of our IT complex - also essential - but here were 20 senior leaders in financial technology, and we really hadn't talked at that point about the client. In later sessions we have spoken in some instances about the client, but I think the client themselves expects us to have their concerns uppermost in our minds in every conversation."

Of course, all conversations conducted by the top-ranking IT executives from the country's largest financial institutions will generally always, at some point, impact upon the client. However, Soergel's concerns were that often, it is perhaps too easy to lose sight of the purpose technology plays in the financial sector.

"Banking is a technology business," says Soergel. "Banking is also a marketing business. The relationships that we sell are our products. We tend to talk about deposit accounts and loan accounts and investment accounts as though they are our products, but really, from a client's perspective, the relationship is what counts."

Soergel also discusses the trust that underpins the very core of banking. "A client will say: 'you earn the right to do business with me. I put my money there because you have earned my trust, and I will bring more of my money there if you continue to earn my trust.' You earn their trust through transaction speed, through security of the transaction, through the quality of the information. So that means the client experience is primarily technology driven."

If sensitivity to customer needs among financial technology departments is not cultivated, then the actual implementation of customer-centric technologies will surely be held back. The structured and formalized cultures inherent in many banks can represent a barrier to the emerging desire among customers - and some of the more progressive IT staff working within the financial industry - to engage and collaborate with their bank. It is anachronistic practices and technologies that may hinder the progress of this emergent, self-organized network of relationships.

Changes afoot

With teamwork and networking so highly revered throughout the upper-echelons of any industry, it appears strange that such performance techniques are viewed with suspicion the lower down the management hierarchy you go. And it is this rigid hierarchy that is often the cultural inhibitor to change. Cross-boundary and multi-channel approaches to technology, customer service and general employee management could potentially have a massively positive impact on the fortunes of most banks, but are most banks too large and cumbersome to adapt to such change?

"I'm part of a relatively new unit at SunTrust, which is the channel management group," says Soergel. "From my perspective, we have certainly been focused on channels for quite a while in terms of how we deliver our products and services to our clients."

The fact that SunTrust's channel management strategy is a new unit says a lot about both the bank's desire to tap into the possibilities that lie within a more multi-channelled approach to customer service, and also the level of consciousness that exists throughout the industry with regards to collaborating with the client in a way the customer is increasingly comfortable with.

"What I think is unique about what we are doing here at SunTrust is the acknowledgement that we have got to look at the channel infrastructure as both bank-outward - such as what products and services we are trying to distribute to the client base, which is more the traditional way of thinking of distribution channels - and to aggressively understand the client view inward, too," says Soergel.

Channel management as described by Soergel covers the issue of social collaboration in one fell swoop. Ensuring that the clients' needs are being met and thereby adapting your technology infrastructure to achieve this is what the sector is all about. "Our strategy has been to look at survey data and client experience design in order to bring together the traditional bank view of channels with the client view of channels, and to understand where there are gaps, where there are differences; where is there an opportunity, potentially, to differentiate."

IT to market

Executives in larger financial institutions can become very jaded, very quickly. What might start out as an energized, progressive and innovative software solution can quickly turn tiresome for them, with providers trying to convince decision makers to adopt the problems that they have solved, rather than solving actual problems that they have.

However, it is difficult to deny that technology has emerged from its legacy constraints; enterprise architecture designed to be more service-oriented is encouraging and enabling more responsive IT systems, so much so that many marketing decisions are now being made by employees with a background rooted solely and solidly in IT.

"I'm working within the marketing organization," says Soergel. "I'm not with any part of the IT organization. So in fact I'm an IT leader who is positioned within marketing, a situation that creates a shared appreciation about what the challenges are in really listening to what our customers want. My position also allows me and the department to understand what we are capable of building internally, what is cost-effective to procure, what bets we should make, and then also working back within the IT organization to create a greater appreciation for the fact that not everything is about cost savings and finding efficiencies. There is also an upside too.

"This is a translation kind of function, and that is where the challenge lies: around finding the right message for each of those two often disparate target audiences - marketing and IT."

There exists the technology to seamlessly connect with a client anytime and anywhere. What is often lacking in the financial sphere is the desire to work beyond pre-existing comfort zones, to actively seek out social collaboration conversations and to engage more openly with clients.

"From a traditional banking standpoint, considering the client experience within this context is both a step in the right direction and also a step into the dark," says Soergel. "I think that we need to become less insular as an industry and look to embrace perspectives from other industries that have perhaps done more on client experience, client-centric design and more client-end channels."

Such an approach promises to be very painful for many financial institutions, although it is an approach that has become more widespread throughout the industry. "There is a prevalent awareness at the senior ranks in business and IT circles that we've got to engage more with the client," reveals Soergel. "But there is also an understanding that the kinds of skills and knowledge that we need in order to achieve this are very different to those we employed in the past. This is the hard part, so that is why I would urge leaders to look beyond the financial industry for answers."

While other industries may hold the key to better client engagement and social collaboration, the financial sector is still a world leader in driving forward IT evolution. One of Soergel's key aims for the future is ensuring that her own pursuit of better multi-channel integration will consider the needs of not just the client, but also her fellow colleagues at SunTrust.

"Considering the needs of our teammates is equally important," she concludes. "So for the folks in our branches and our call centers, I want to pursue multi-channel integration that is equipping them with that complete profile of the client data and their transaction history in a way that can bring more powerful, more differentiated service to the client. That is my ultimate aim, and I see a lot of opportunity there."

'Ideas are everywhere' - the key tenets of social collaboration

• Digital platforms are driving social collaboration because they can facilitate organic 'brainstorming' procedures, in both a professional and a personal capacity
• Social collaboration is particularly appealing to companies because participation is generally low investment with the chance of high return
• High-end discussions at conferences and summits are great for many things, but an active inter-company platform for discussion is infinitely superior
• Social collaboration not only drives change; it enables people to recognize, distinguish and adjust to change, often with the support of their peers
• Social collaboration is enabling young employees and clients to work with technologies and systems they feel comfortable with, rather than having to learn old processes and databases
• If a bank's success is predicated on cross-selling, then a social collaboration strategy can equip them with the cross-channel knowledge that sometimes gets lost in a siloed environment