GlobalVision Systems Solutions – Collaboration Center ™
Financial institutions such as banks, credit unions, stockbrokers, insurance companies, etc. are in the business of providing financial services to the general public. As a financial institution grows, it naturally sets up more branches in different regions to attract more customers. It also establishes new departments to offer more products and services to its customers. Consequently, the organization becomes more complex and the service quality, productivity and profitability become difficult to control.
It often happens that a business customer may have several different accounts such as savings, DDAs and CDs, etc. with a financial institution. In addition, it may need the financial institution for other services such as construction loans, business credit lines, trade finance, etc. Due to his/her diverse needs, the customer may need to deal with different people of specific departments and branches for particular purposes. These complicated relationships become even more confusing when the marketing people come into the picture for a variety of campaign promotions. If the financial institution implements a referral and reward program, then front office clerks will also come into the game.
Misunderstanding often arises if these employees do not collaborate with each other and synchronize all of their activities regarding the customer at all times because the customer simply cannot remember which person he/she has talked to regarding a particular issue. However, it is very difficult to synchronize all these activities because every employee needs to handle many customers. Chances are that a financial institution may lose valuable business opportunities, and sometimes even the customers, due to their weakness in collaboration.
Collaboration Center™ (US patent pending) is designed for employees of the same organization to collaborate and synchronize their activities relating to a specific customer in order to ensure the best service quality. Through this synchronization mechanism, companies will be able to improve customer satisfaction, enhance the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, boost team morale, and promote overall productivity and profitability.
Description
The traditional approach for employees to collaborate their efforts and synchronize various activities is to conduct a group meeting on a regular basis. There are several issues with this approach. First, to find the right time that fits into everybody’s busy schedule is a difficult task. Secondly, meetings can never be conducted frequently enough to match customers activities because a customer can initiate an unexpected activity at any time. This may happen just before the meeting without giving the company any chance for collaboration. Furthermore, since employees of different departments and branches may be located far away from each other, a face-to-face meeting is often not practical and video conferencing is very expensive. Therefore, a group meeting is not a practical solution for employees to collaborate and synchronize their activities regarding a specific customer in today’s fast-paced economy.
As e-mail becomes popular, some companies try to use it to collaborate and synchronize the activities with respect to a customer. Under such an environment, an employee needs to list his/her activities and related information about the customer in an e-mail and send it to all possible recipients who may contact this specific customer in the future. Obviously, several problems are created. First, to avoid missing any important person, the e-mail writer tends to send the e-mail to as many recipients as possible. When every employee starts to send e-mail about his/her customers to many other employees, each employee will receive a huge amount of e-mail because there are simply too many activities involving different customers all the time. Secondly, employees will not be able to remember the contents of all of the e-mail even if they have the time to read each one of them. Moreover, an employee may waste most of his/her time reading the e-mail about certain customers whom he/she will never need to deal with because the e-mail senders may have listed him/her as a recipient simply for precaution.
Collaboration Center™ uses the customer-oriented approach to synchronize the activities of all employees in the company. Before a customer service representative starts to contact any customer, he/she can access the Collaboration Center™ to find out which employees have dealt with this customer before on what issue, what has been planned for this customer in the future, and what are the hot events relating to this customer.
Furthermore, Collaboration Center™ enables employees to refer business to each other and set personal schedules according to the customers’ activities. After completing research about the customer’s past activities and future plans in a matter of minutes through Collaboration Center™ , an employee will be able to deal with the customers with great confidence.
Collaboration Center™ uses the browser-based technology for users to access it through either the Internet or Intranet with quick response time. There is little need for user training or technical support. It is compatible with Windows, Unix, and Linux client. It uses the ‘thin client’ system architecture so that a user computer with very small memory and no hard drive can still access Collaboration Center™ easily.
Conclusion
Customers are the most important assets in a company. Providing customers with high-quality services has been the top priority of all leading financial institutions. To achieve outstanding performance, Collaboration Center™ uses customers as the center point for employees to collaborate their efforts in rendering the best services to their customers. Collaboration Center™ empowers financial institutions to effectively serve customers, improve customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty. Ultimately, Collaboration Center™ increases the productivity and profitability of the entire organization.