A proactive bank is the future, while reactive banking is a symbol of the past. Nowadays, clients desire banking services where they can solve their problems and issues as quickly as possible, and the latter provides that. In this article, we will explain what is the meaning of proactive communication and explain how to achieve it in your bank. Do you want to learn more? Read on.
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“Proactive” in Business – Meaning
What is the meaning of proactive communication in business? This term refers to customer service that is focused on anticipating customer needs or problems and offering solutions before they occur. It’s contrary to reactive communication, where customer service is available as long as the client approaches the bank.
When it comes to banks, traditionally, you can see the reactive approach – you have your call centres ready to serve the customers, and there are agents available at each branch. Even a chat inside an app can be treated as a part of reactive banking since it requires the customer to launch the app in the first place.
The proactive approach in banks means analysing the data on each customer and offering them a solution tailored to their needs based on the collected information. Some banks have already introduced it – for example, we prepared an AI-powered transaction classification system for one of our clients, which enabled them to present customer data conveniently.
From a business perspective, structured data helps achieve proactive communication thanks to better customer segmentation, product recommendations or even event-based notifications.
How to Become a Proactive Bank
Becoming a proactive bank requires some work. Whilst typically it’s related to data, the changes might also involve whole processes in your organization. How to switch from reactive to proactive communication effectively? Here are our 5 tips!
Integrate and Clean Your Data
The first step you need to take is integrating your data – making sure all the information you have can be accessed in one system, eliminating data silos. For that, you should opt for a dedicated solution, such as a finance data platform.
With all the information in one place, you should proceed with cleaning it. Raw data will never be a valuable source since it contains a lot of pieces of info that are irrelevant, or could cause bias. Hence, you should consider what matters and what doesn’t, work on your existing and historical data accordingly, and establish a system that will collect only high-quality data in the future.
With all of this ready, you can introduce an AI-ML solution that will provide you with predictive insights based on the information you collected. Now, all you have to do is come up with the solutions for the clients that will be implemented based on these insights.
Focus Even on the Smallest Elements
Naturally, your attention might be focused on the most important data, like recurring transactions. This is a good approach, but it will not make your bank fully proactive. If you want to embrace this type of communication, you need to get into details. Let’s look at an example to understand what we mean.
Imagine you have a client with recurring payments, such as rent. In a proactive bank, you can offer the client to automate particular transactions. Not every client will opt for this option, though – can you still be proactive if this doesn’t work?
Yes, you can! For example, you might opt for personalized features in an intelligent mobile app interface. In this case, your digital banking platform should display a shortcut button to make the recurring transaction every month, near the time the customer did it manually. This way, despite them not opting for automation, it becomes much easier (and quick) for them to make the payments.
Use AI for Recommendations
Do not be afraid to utilise AI-based, fully automated systems to stay proactive. A good artificial intelligence model will be able to recognise the needs of your customers and provide them with exactly what they need. For instance, you have a blog on your bank’s website, right? Does it contain a guide to investing? If it does, you can link this to your AI system – when a customer shows interest in investing, for instance, because they save up a lot of money each month or simply because they were scrolling through investment options in your app, the AI system can provide them with a link to the related content.
Why is it important? Not only will this solve the problem of your customer without the usual hassle of contacting a customer service agent, but also you will cut down the operating costs of your CS teams – after all, you will reduce the number of tickets/calls they receive.
The same goes for sales and offering products – with artificial intelligence woven into a customer engagement platform, you can make sure that the product offered is tailored to the needs of your customers, and they don’t have to contact you specifically to request a service or to ask what works for them.
Manage Your Processes
While data is important, it’s the internal processes that can be the make or break of becoming a proactive bank. Therefore, do not focus purely on the information collected on each client – look into your procedures.
For example, if your customer service, marketing, and sales agents work separately, at a long physical distance, it might be difficult for their members to contact each other and come up with solutions based on the data. This will make the process much longer, hence blocking the “proactive” factor in your bank. Becoming proactive does not mean that everything will be done automatically, so you have to ensure that each manual process goes as smoothly as possible.
However, there are processes that should be automated to streamline internal communication, or simply to improve agent productivity, hence letting them work on proactive solutions. How to do that?
For instance, you may use our digital process automation solution for banks. With it, you can easily manage various processes within your organisation, including:
- loan acquisition path,
- customer acquisition process,
- internal business processes,
- credit risk assessment,
- customer and product support.
You should also consider our Appointment Manager – a digital tool for scheduling meetings. It can be integrated with your internal systems to provide your employees with an overview of their schedule, but also works as a widget for the customers, streamlining their appointment booking. In the end, this solution is proactive itself – it solves the problem of customer wanting to appoint meetings after office hours – and helps you achieve proactive communication by increasing the productivity of your customer service teams.
Don’t Forget the Role of Humans
Despite all the benefits of technology, AI and ML included, you cannot replace humans – they will be the best for certain tasks, and some clients may even prefer to contact an agent rather than a bot or read a blog post. Therefore, our final tip is: do not forget about humans.
Behind every recommendation, solution or piece of content, there should be a customer service agent ready to dispel any doubts and provide help for the customer reactively. Surely, becoming proactive should become your priority, but eliminating reactive communication is impossible, so be ready to provide it when required.
Conclusions
Knowing the meaning of proactive business communication in banking, you can probably see that this approach has many advantages: from reducing operational costs to delivering more enjoyable customer experiences. Therefore, we strongly recommend adopting proactivity. If you need help with the IT solutions to support this transformation, feel free to contact us – at Ailleron, we have the experience and skills you need to become a truly proactive bank.
You might also read: How Banks Can Use AI to Improve Sales & Marketing
