Fintech

Drive seamless CX across the front, middle, and back office

The bigger you get, the more complex you become. But the right BPO can break the silos separating back, middle, and front offices down—while also helping you charge toward better customer experiences.

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Why seamless CX needs close integration of all office functions (and how outsourcing can help)
Whether you’re a challenger bank, a growing fintech brand or an established giant, all financial businesses are beholden to the same natural law of entropy: The bigger you get, the more complex you become. Left to this natural order, office functions (back, mid and front) fall into a transactional relationship—completing high-volume, high-importance tasks in isolation. Traditionally, both new and established brands have grown by partnering with BPOs to increase the individual capacity of each function individually. But scaling office functions across the back, mid and front office with that model comes with a hidden cost: fragmentation. And this is bad news—a lack of integration between office functions almost always means customer experience quality suffers. The result is that growth creates distance from what customers really need. But there’s good news, too. With the right BPO partnership, challenger brands can resist this natural entropy and deliver better customer experiences at the same time. That’s because as you defragment your operations, it gets easier to differentiate with world-class CX. The key is a BPO with the breadth and expertise to help you kill both birds with one stone. A BPO that can keep processes integrated across office levels (and adapt their systems as your brand evolves), stave off fragmentation and keep your brand delivering exceptional customer experiences. Let’s dig into how the right BPO can break the silos separating back, middle and front offices down—while also helping you charge toward world-class CX.

The three offices of CX

Most financial institutions run on three core functions:

    The front office is whomever your customers or clients see—think sales teams and customer service agents (and in the world of finance, traders fit here, too). The front office is where all-important, brand-to-customer interactions happen.

    The middle office covers risk mitigation, regulatory analysis, and IT. They ensure deals are followed through and handled correctly. The middle office supports the front.

    And the back office (an area we excel at supporting) are your HR teams, CRM experts, admin, payroll. And for financial services providers, there are specialty back-office teams (we call them Banking Operations) who handle manual KYC/OFAC watchlist screening, fraud and dispute investigation, chargeback management, etc. These teams are essential to keeping your business running by supporting the stars in the mid and front offices.

    These functions all touch the customer experience at different points—but left to their own devices, they drift apart. And as your brand scales up, it’s harder to break down the communication and process barriers that naturally form over time. So how do you unite these functions connected as part of the same whole?
    Integrated CX
    The traditional model treats customer experience as a series of isolated activities that get passed between all office functions. To unite these functions, brands need to encourage joined-up thinking and open communication across all teams connected to the customer experience. That means looking for opportunities to create continuity between teams—continually aligning insight, actions and outcomes that enhance long-term value. For example, CRM teams in the back-office and customer service agents on the frontlines should have mechanisms to share the same data in order to increase a single understanding of each customer’s needs and relationship history—so every interaction feels like part of the same journey. Meanwhile, mid-office changes (like updates to regulatory obligations) can be slow to disseminate throughout the CX operations elsewhere. Greater integration with back- and front-office operations would inform and influence customer activities much earlier on.
    The role of outsourcing in seamless CX
    Traditional outsourcing treats connections between offices like a one-way flow of information and action. We believe a more effective approach removes those office boundaries and allows CX-centric thinking to solve problems and improve efficiencies. The more that your teams remain open, share information and sync up processes, the more successfully you can avoid entropy and drive positive long-term growth to deliver world-class CX. One advantage of hiring a flexible, experienced BPO partner is that they understand where and when best to integrate CX-first thinking. They can find opportunities to streamline processes, reduce risk and get teams talking to maximize your service impact.
    Business transformation and Relationship-based Outsourcing

    Expanding financial brands often seek outsourcing partners to sustain current ways of working. But partnerships that grow capacity without also growing integration create disjointed customer experiences that deteriorate as the business gets bigger. We believe CX first outsourcing remedies the tendency to fragment as you grow. Our approach considers the big picture for how offices can build connections and improve efficiencies while also sweating the small stuff to keep delivering value for customers. That’s why we stabilize growing businesses as one of our services. From in-depth CX-first training to extensive audits of your customer channels and back-office processes, our RBO approach helps business transform through:

    Streamlining your processes–Instead of wrangling multiple systems that work out of sync, we thread processes across teams into sensible, productive workflows that absorb growing pains

    Reducing risks–We’re careful about how we roll out the technologies or systems to transform teams. We always have a view on the long term rather than focus on the short-term wins that can derail business progress and CX delivery

    Confirming what’s working–We continuously monitor the performance of teams, processes and systems as your business evolves. If it’s not working, we change it

    Partner with a BPO who can stabilize your growth
    Don’t let the entropy that comes with fast growth fragment your offices, break down communication and let your reputation for great customer service decline. There’s a way to control your expansion without compromising on cost or quality. Bring on board an experienced outsourcing partner who can guide you toward closer office collaboration and deliver exceptional customer experiences that set your brand apart.

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