Vizolution’s VP of Sales, Jonathan Jewett sat down with us after Day One at CXFS 2018 in Boston to speak about his experiences so far.
This is Vizolution’s first time at Customer Experience for Financial Services (CXFS). What have been your thoughts on the event so far?
There are more than 60 leading CX speakers in attendance, and hundreds of others from many well-known companies in the financial services sector, so it’s great to see such an impressive turn-out. It’s an honour that we can be here and network with some major decision-makers and thought leaders in the market.
I’ve also been really impressed at how interactive the conference seems to be. There are a variety of curated networking sessions scheduled over the next few days, plus lots of opportunities for group discussions, workshops and CX practitioner-only sessions.
Unsurprisingly, for an event so focused on optimising customer journeys, the customer service at CXFS 2018 has been really well done too. There is even a concierge service!
It is only Day One at CXFS – but what have been the highlights so far? Any takeaways?
There have been some really interesting keynote addresses this morning, including a presentation on why companies should avoid overpromising, so they do not inadvertently underdeliver. The speaker, Deborah Cornwell, argued why it was imperative for a company to identify and recognise what product or service they were offering in order to align customer expectation accordingly. There was also a great presentation by Michael Marx on the importance of recognising the individual needs of each consumer and how lumping customers of products into general groups, like baby boomer and millennial, is no longer effective in today’s customer-focused approach.
There are lots more exciting keynotes coming up, including a talk by Martin Lange on marketing and CX, and what can be learned from CX and vice-versa, so I’m looking forward to that one.
Interesting... Listening to your customer so that you can create optimum customer journeys seems to have been the theme for the conference on Day One. Why do you think banks should be doing this?
I think it’s essential for banks to take a customer-centric approach when creating customer journeys, as customers will, of course, be the ones going on the journey. Banks, therefore, need to listen to what their customers want, and adapt and incorporate their needs to make the customer journey as convenient and intuitive as possible. Banks should also pay attention to feedback on what customers typically dislike about customer journeys, and then endeavour to eliminate as many key pain points along the way as possible. In an age where it’s never been easier or quicker to switch bank accounts, it’s even more important for banks to be receptive to how its customers want to bank.
Is it difficult to balance the needs of the customer with the business needs of the bank when creating a bank’s customer journey?
It can, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. For example, we helped Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) deploy a completely paperless mortgage process late last year, transforming a 100% paper process to a 100% paperless one in less than six months. We did this through two of Vizolution’s flagship solutions, vDoc and vScreen, which enable digital document sharing and compliance. This paperless mortgage process, which is completed totally online, brought about a number of benefits for both the bank and the customer. For example, the customer saved 11 days on average per customer journey, with around 4-5% of customers even receiving a mortgage within 24 hours, and many more within a week. Through using a completely paperless mortgage process, RBS was also able to save an estimated 4.2 million sheets of paper. Of course, there are significant environmental benefits to this paper-free initiative too.
This is the second event that Vizolution has attended in North America recently. How significant is the North American market for Vizolution’s future expansion?
It is only natural that we look to expand our footprint in such a huge market as North America, and in fact we have quite a busy schedule of North American events in the coming months too, including FinovateFall in New York in September, and a few more later on in the year.
We implemented our customer experience solutions for HSBC USA earlier this year and are excited about replicating our UK customer satisfaction scores (90%) in North America. We are also planning on launching our solutions in HSBC Canada in the coming months. Vizolution has a number of exciting opportunities in the region that we can’t wait to get started on!
