Qorus-Accenture’s Banking Innovation of the Month award for July goes to Client Connect, DBS’s data platform bridging the online-offline gap for employees and customers.
With all the buzz around using data and AI and ML to create seamless, ultra-personalized online customer journeys, it’s easy to forget that offline interactions are still an important feature of financial services, particularly in wealth and investment management. DBS Bank’s Client Connect, a one-stop workbench allowing frontline employees an instant 360 view of a client, leverages data and AI to join the dots between online and offline relationship management, ensuring a smoother journey for all concerned.
The Singaporean multinational’s eureka moment came when they realized that in the prevailing digital-first climate, their end-to-end, online-to-offline experience often remained fragmented and campaign-led. Journey designs were done in silo, without considering the end-to-end journey where customers not only interact with the bank online, but also through phone calls and in-branch meetings with relationship managers and other staff.
It’s a familiar story for many financial institutions: frontliners need to trawl through multiple tools to get a holistic view of a customer, and are ill-equipped with data-driven insights and knowledge to help them deliver the most effective service and advice, resulting in missed opportunities. Customers might pick up the phone to find that their RM lacks updated information about them, or that they have to repeat their story to a different person each time, or that the conversation revolves around irrelevant product pushes rather than clear and relevant financial advice.
DBS’s solution, Client Connect, is a next-generation unified workbench powered by data and AI/ML, enabling employees to instantly access the most relevant up-to-date data and insights for any client so that they can handle service requests promptly and effectively, and engage customers in meaningful and relevant wealth conversations. Used across all the bank’s segments, it is particularly relevant to Treasures, DBS’s premium wealth management and investment service, which sees a relatively high volume of offline engagements as part of its hyper-personalized customer journey.
Using the modular platform, relationship managers and other frontline staff can see at a glance the customer’s full profile (overview of accounts, investment profile, preferences, financial knowledge, etc.), as well as their recent interactions across all the bank’s channels, online and offline. The Next Best Conversation (NBC) tool uses nudges to provide personalized insights and suggestions for each client, helping the RM to contextualize their conversation and giving them angles to approach their clients, rather than just another product/sales lead. An instant feedback mechanism, using a simple thumbs up/down for each NBC suggestion, ensures continuous improvement of the data model. Frontline and management views in the workbench help to keep day-to-day operations running smoothly and boost productivity.
Since its launch in Singapore, Client Connect has led to a significant uptick in client engagement and a massive reduction in overdue service requests, besides being a big hit with frontline employees for its time-saving, productivity-enhancing features. DBS plans to roll out the platform to all its other markets (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and China) by early next year, benefiting around 6000 staff in total. We look forward to seeing more financial industry players adopting AI/ML innovations to bridge the online-offline gap for their clients and employees.
DBS’s innovation will be automatically selected as a nominee for the Qorus-Accenture Banking Innovation Awards 2022. Submit your innovations on the Banking Innovation portal until 12th August for August Innovation of the Month. Participation is free of charge and open to all Qorus members.
