Banking on Video Technology
Video solutions help financial institutions enhance customer engagement and improve internal communications.
Recently, a Midwestern bank with around three dozen branches reached out to CDW for help. The bank’s customers had grown accustomed to the friendly, in-person service of a small financial institution, but as the organization grew, it couldn’t afford to staff all roles at every location — and particularly not specialized positions such as loan officers.
Only a decade ago, this problem would have been essentially unsolvable. Either the bank could give customers face-to-face interactions with loan officers, or save money on staff, but not both. With modern technology, however, the answer was readily apparent: video.
As technology improves and costs come down, video is emerging as one of the best tools to help banks deliver superior service, improve corporate-to-branch communications and put a personal touch back into banking. And there’s still time for financial institutions to be early adopters, setting themselves apart from their competitors. According to a 2017 report from Vidyo, more than 99 percent of banks say that the quality of customer engagement is “important” or “extremely important” to the success of their business, and 90 percent say they expect that a high-quality video banking service would have either a “positive” or “strongly positive” impact on customer satisfaction. And yet, only one in five banks has fully deployed a video banking solution.
In the case of the Midwestern bank, CDW worked with the institution to install video kiosks at each branch, allowing customers to connect with a handful of loan officers who were based at the bank’s headquarters. The bank avoided having to hire loan officers at each branch, saving millions of dollars in salaries. Additionally, the bank found it easier to recruit talented individuals to work at a central location than to the institution’s far-flung branches. By deploying the video solution, the bank has grown its loan program, improved customer service and increased its loan close rate.
Reaching Customers on Their Terms
Video solutions can also help banks connect with customers in their homes — or wherever they happen to be. While some people prefer to visit a bank’s branch location in person to conduct business, other customers (especially millennials) have grown accustomed to conducting most of their banking online or via mobile devices. Even for these customers, a face-to-face interaction can help put them at ease, particularly when they are conducting complex, high-dollar transactions, such as taking out a mortgage or car loan. To accommodate these customers, a number of banks are incorporating video tools into their online and mobile banking solutions.
Finally, we are also seeing a number of financial institutions adopt video tools to help streamline communications between their corporate headquarters and their distributed retail environment — helping to decrease travel costs, increase face time and align strategy throughout the organization.
Until recently, cost and technological limitations were the chief hurdles preventing financial institutions and other businesses from adopting robust video solutions. Today, those problems have largely been solved, but some hurdles still exist. Organizations that fail to train their users and encourage customer adoption of video tools, for example, are unlikely to see transformational results. But for financial institutions committed to improving customer satisfaction and internal communications, the time for video is now.
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