If you’re looking to start rolling out video banking, there are 2 possible strategies to adopt: you can take a centralized or decentralized approach. But which strategy best fits your business goals? What are the benefits of the centralized and decentralized approach? And can you combine the two? Find out in this strategic guide.
1. Why CX video calling?
2. Implementing video banking centrally or decentrally
3. Reasons to centralise
4. Reasons to decentralise
5. A hybrid model
6. Implementing the hybrid model
7. Finding a strategy that fits
8. How Rabobank scaled video banking to 10.000+ branch agents
Why make video calling with customers part of your digital transformation strategy?
Even since before the COVID-19 pandemic, banks have been under a lot of pressure to strive for efficiency. Branches were closing and workflows were being digitised. At the same time, customers are now showing new behaviours: they are still looking for personal contact, even as customer interaction is moving away from physical branches to online communication.
Finding a solution that combines these two industry-defining challenges is essential if you want to take your Digital Transformation strategy safely through the pandemic - and satisfy both your customers and the board. In banking as in any other industry, digital transformation is the way to go. Yet digital branches do not equal impersonal customer interactions.
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Especially in these times when entire branch staff is required to work remotely and clients are mandated to stay at home, it is important not to leave the human touch out of the equation. Video banking is a solution for deepening your customer relationships digitally, while remaining personal at the same time. There are many different use cases for video banking where interacting with customers via video brings value to your bank - such as mortgage loan applications, wealth management or B2B account management.
At the moment, the default in banking has suddenly shifted from face-to-face customer interaction in-branch to 100% remote. In 2018, however, 80% of financial institutions were already offering video banking or planning to offer it in the near future. In the coming year (maybe months), live video interaction will become the new standard. If you haven't already got one, you need to come up with a strategy for making the shift from communicating with customers face-to-face to video calling now.
What strategy can you use to implement video banking on a large scale?
Implementing video banking the centralised or decentralised way
In order to offer video-enabled contact across your services and mature video as a channel, you can take a centralising or decentralising approach to video banking.
- Central
To follow a centralised strategy for implementing video banking means focusing on rolling out video calls in a central Contact Center first. This contact center is not necessarily a customer service for inbound inquiries. It can also consist of a specialist, central advice team giving mortgage advice, for example, or handling all business loan applications. Plus, it's also used for outbound sales conversations such as online demos.
- Decentral
When choosing to implement video banking decentrally, you start by rolling out to remote employees, your ‘field’ workforce. These can be both branch employees and account managers or sales reps working remotely in the region.
How to determine which of these two strategies best fits your business needs for video banking? We’ll go over the reasons for choosing a centralised or decentralised approach.
Reasons for centralising video banking
1. Faster delivery, higher efficiency
Centralising your banking services is equivalent to making your human resources - advisors, service agents, sales reps - available to all customers, regardless of their location. With central video banking, waiting time decreases and employees deliver a faster service.
Also, centralisation is a good strategy for managing the overflow in demands coming from customers at local branches. If a local branch receives a lot of requests for mortgage advice but only has one advisor available, an efficient solution can be to give customers the option of scheduling a video call with a financial advisor at a central contact center.
A centralised approach for implementing video banking
2. Easy scaling
When you choose to implement video banking at a central contact center first, it is easier to scale to more agents faster. Compared to calling customers over the phone or having in-person meetings, starting with video calling implies a big transformation in the way your employees do their job. With advisors and agents physically present at one and the same location, it is easier to train them, provide the right information and to give feedback in order to improve their performance.
So by starting with a centralised roll-out you can really boost employee adoption of video banking, control the quality of work and hence, get more agents in on video banking.
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3. Expertise for every customer
The ultimate benefit of centralising advisors and agents at a video contact center is creating a center of expertise. And then being able to distribute this expertise knowledge equally among your customers, throughout regions and markets. This way, centralised video banking has the potential to perfectly bring together supply and demand in financial services.
Benefits of decentralising video banking
1. High-value conversations
Most of your valuable customer touch points are to be found locally. Clients contact local bank branches for products such as mortgages, insurances, investments, and services like private and business banking.
Interactions with these customers have high business value but also concern more complex financial products, so it’s important to map these high-value customer conversations. The next step is to devise a strategy for which channels to use in order to perform as many of these valuable interactions as possible. Some contact with customers might continue to be face-to-face, while other conversations can be organised more efficiently through video calls.
Moreover, decentralised video banking in this sense is not just a means of raising efficiency from the bank’s perspective, but also of answering new client demands. Research from 2016 already showed, for example, that at least 54% of affluent clients themselves would be willing to have a video call with their financial advisor for discussing investments.
2. Sales opportunities through deeper relationships & higher trust
Because local advisors and account managers build more personal relationships with clients, it is easier for them to up-sell or cross-sell different products to one and the same customer.
And when remote advisors are able to connect with customers through video calls, they do not lose time on travel, scheduling or other administrative tasks. This way video calling makes their business hours more efficient and will in turn increase sales results even further.
3. True digital transformation
Head offices and contact centers are usually the first to feel the impact of new digital initiatives. For most remote employees working at a local branch, digital transformation can remain a buzz word that is hard to relate with. By rolling out video banking decentrally, however, you will bring digital innovation right to the front lines of your organisation.
On top of that, to agents who consider digitisation a threat to their jobs, you’re showing that you understand the importance of human contact and that your financial advisors are worth investing in.
Like to see an example of how to implement Video Banking?
Learn how SNS Bank rolled out video banking to local branches >
The hybrid model: combine the best of both
There is a third approach. We illustrated how only by centralising video banking at centers of expertise you can make specialist financial knowledge instantly available to all banking customers. Local branches, by extension, will continue to perform a more generic service function. However, we also pointed out how your highest-value customers are found locally.
In fact, it’s on the interplay between central and decentral that video banking can make the biggest impact for both your customers and the business. We found that most financial organisations have implemented a hybrid model for video banking, combining the centralised and decentralised approach.
Hybrid option 1. Connecting local queries to central expertise
One example of such a hybrid combination is when branches function as a referrer. Remote agents and advisors signal when a customer needs to be connected with an expert for specific services and information, or for a product they’re ready to buy. They can then schedule a video call to talk to a specialist advisor (or sales rep) at a contact center.
Hybrid option 2. Reinforcing the strength of the regional specialist
Another use case at the interface of central and decentral video banking: equipping remote subject matter experts with a video solution. Often times, specialist advisors and account managers still travel throughout the region to meet customers in person, even though their client base is large. Video calling will enable these types of regional experts to cut down travel time significantly: by serving customers via video, they can work from one or several central branch locations (or ‘hubs’) within the region.
The benefits of a hybrid model for video banking
These are the benefits of combining the central and decentral approach to implement video banking:
A combination of the central and decentral approach will allow you to make the best possible use of your human resources, i.e. the experience and expertise of your agents, advisors and account managers.
+ Spreading central expertiseBy rolling out video both centrally and decentrally, you’re making the expertise of your (central) head offices and contact centers available to local (decentral) branches: your central ‘hub’ can function as a learning center for local advisors and regional specialists.
+ Connecting with clients fast and managing relations at the same timeA hybrid strategy for implementing video banking will allow you to interact with clients fast and personally from your contact center, as well as to maintain, manage and strengthen customer relationships through your local branch advisors and account managers.
Learn how to successfully implement and scale Video Banking in your organisation
Download your free Video Banking Implementation Guide >
Implementing the hybrid model
As the hybrid approach shows, the success of implementing video lies in combining central with local, and digital with human. For your customers, the real value of video banking consists of being able to speak to a human financial advisor when it’s convenient, and for you it’s maximising efficiency. In order to achieve both of these goals, you need to roll-out video both centrally and decentrally.
One successful strategy for video banking that our financial clients are implementing is central first and then extends to decentral teams:
- Start with a centralised team and gather the first results
- Expand video banking to other business units withcentralised teams, and gradually improve the customer journey there
- Then expand to your first branches and decentralised teams to involve more stakeholders horizontally across the organisation
- Scale: since you now have enough successful to show as results to agents and stakeholders/decision makers, it is time to roll-out video banking to all agents working with the use cases that video has already been implemented in
- Optimise the current customer journeys for video banking and add more complex use cases.
Find the strategy that fits your business
But the hybrid implementation is just an example. There is no single strategy for successfully scaling video banking. Which strategy best fits your bank depends on your organisation, its identity, market position and customers.
Strategize about these topics in order to define your approach:
- Your current organisational model: make sure the video banking strategy you choose reflects the structure of your organisation - in terms of people, processes and technology.
- Pick one use case to start with: which activities will you create most business value with in the short term? Try to connect supply and demand: where in the customer journey can your supplies (i.e. your workforce capacity) meet the demands of your customers?
- Combine centralisation with decentralisation, because you will have to apply both approaches to create maximum value out of video banking.
In the end, banks looking to optimise their omni-channel strategy have to find the combination of digital and personal interactions that is right for their specific organisation, and the local markets they serve.
Hungry for more?
Learn how leading banks are implementing Video Banking in 2022 in our latest report on the State of Video Banking 👇
This blog has been co-authored by our Video Banking Expert Ferdinand Royackers and Content Marketer Lisanne Buisman. Last updated 28 January 2022.
