Enhancing brand trust: How to deliver compliance as a positive customer experience

Covid-19
,
Digital Transformation
,
Innovation
,
Blog
,
August 13, 2020
7
minutes read

Digital transformation and the adoption of digital technologies have been on organisation’s agendas for several years, the main drivers being productivity improvements and resource efficiency. However, today’s conversation is about taking new products to market and improving customer experience as part of a growth strategy.

In financial services, technology is not about replacing people, but changing outmoded working practices and processes, adopting new technologies to improve the customer experience against their rising expectations. We now accept online personal financial transactions as the norm, and the quality of the online experience matters more than ever, as pain-points creating friction result in lost customers, revenue, and reputation.

As financial services providers expand their customer-facing platforms to meet the growing opportunity, the need to build security into their digital channels against cyber-attacks also grows.  Malicious actors have more opportunities to commit fraud, exploiting vulnerabilities associated with consumer-identity and access-management controls.

The Challenge: How to deliver security and compliance without creating a clunky experience for customers

We all expect a ‘smooth and simple’ digital experience, including fast authentication and log-in, as well as seamless web and mobile interactivity. However, despite the focus on user convenience and simplicity, we do not always enjoy the onboarding process, wrangling with cumbersome digital-authentication requirements, as identity-proofing (validating the identity of the user) and multifactor authentication have become standard controls during user registration and log-in through the secure-journey life cycle.

Whilst these protocols are clearly needed, organisations increasingly need a secure onboarding customer journey that is relatively engaging. Companies able to offer this while maintaining strong security standards will gain customer growth and loyalty. An experience-driven secure journey as the first customer touchpoint can become a competitive advantage, building immediate brand trust.Alongside this, regulators are pressing financial service organisations to give users more data privacy and flexibility in opening accounts. New legislation will impose escalating penal­ties on companies that fail to gain user consent to collect and process data at all stages of digital transactions.

Security and user experience are becoming a reason for consumers to purchase a product, in the same way that organic and free trade labels have driven sales previously. To build initial customer trust, organisations need a holistic and adaptive onboarding compliance process and be proactive instead of responding to each new regulatory or cyber-attack challenge.

So, providers face a threefold challenge: to meet regulatory demands, to fulfill rising consumer expectations, and to ensure security and resilience against cyber-attacks. Across all of these challenges, a proactive digital approach to privacy and data protection, starting with the initial onboarding, is needed.

How can security, compliance, and user experience be combined to deliver a source of competitive advantage in onboarding?

A recent PWC report, ‘Compliance Transformed’, looked at how technology-enabled compliance can be effective and transformative. There were four key themes:

  1. Adopt design principles as a priority

Optimally designed secure customer journeys have human-centered design principles at their core, conducive to user experience at all times.  To improve the customer experience, the design should also permit the effective layering of controls, such as identity-proofing and multifactor authentication.

Trust is key to compete effectively and is strengthened through strong, reliable user experience. Understanding how this impacts customers’ engagement with the organisation, can help create a clear path toward driving a differentiated customer experience.

  1. Strike a balance between smart risk-taking and user experience

When designing the secure onboarding journey, strike a balance between security and the customer experience. Compliance processes designed with the customer in mind support a differentiated experience.

Try to guide customers to an enhanced fully digital authentication process, moving away from the traditional paper-based approach, and less secure options, such as email-based links or text-message codes. If you deliver users a seamless digital journey this will reduce fall out during the on boarding process, thus creating greater future business opportunities.

  1. Use technology to reduce friction from rigid multifactor-authorisation processes

Compliance processes should be enabled by technology and data from both provider and customer perspectives to reduce friction, time and cost burdens. A customer-sensitive, technology-based approach to the selection and application of controls through the secure-journey life cycle will both improve security and support a positive customer experience.

Technology-powered compliance helps increase customer satisfaction and revenues –  thus ultimately the bottom line - by reducing both the cost of compliance processes and the likelihood of expensive compliance failures. High reliability and efficiency in compliance can only be achieved by having the technology and datasets available to drive these outcomes.

  1. Speedy authentication

The cost of managing, monitoring and delivering compliance is a major overhead cost for organisations operating in a regulated industry, often it is a slow and cumbersome process. Rapid movement through authentication is desirable for customers and providers alike. Speed is high on the list of user expectations in their journey.

Shifting compliance activities from having high burdens on the customer experience towards saving them time, cost and removing friction with intelligent use of technology­­ builds credibility throughout their brand, and the product portfolio. Online is about convenience, simplicity, and saving time. Compliance is the first customer touchpoint. Driven by technology, this can enhance the customer relationship from the outset.

What's next?

As organisations expand their digital-based services, the need for optimal customer experience within the compliance aspects of the customer journey will only grow. It’s important to strike the right balance between the convenience and security attributes of this, to increase customer satisfaction, grow business opportunities, and reputation alike.

Digital solutions like Nivo build capacity, whilst also removing compliance burdens on the incumbent manual, inefficient less effective processes that negatively affect customer experience, costs, and culture. Now is the time to deploy technology to develop more efficient, automated, and effective compliance – with the customer experience as the driver, not just risk.

Digitally enabled compliance activities are predictive, preventative, and proactive, not just detective. Is your approach to compliance fit for the customer experience?

Receive 'Leaving legacies The digitisation of regulated Industries'

For regulated industries, where risks need to be expertly mitigated, it can be difficult to make the move away from widely adopted legacy systems.In this guide, we’ll run through the benefits and challenges of digital transformation for financial services, with practical steps on how to move away from legacy systems for the betterment of business and customers.

Written by

Ian Brookes
Non-executive Director, Nivo

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