Author: Amit Das

Categories
VCIP Digital KYC solutions video based kyc Video based KYC identification Video KYC Video KYC for Banks Video KYC India

The Digital Future of Customer Care

Business tech is quickly transforming as social networking and online interactions have taken over our everyday habits, both personally and professionally. But in spite of staying connected online, somewhere deep down we all prefer the human touch, especially since the pandemic which led us to living in isolation for months. This is where the online-offline balance comes into play as businesses need to focus on customer engagement and service just as much as they focused on implementing the technology that’ll drive it.

Customer support technology is only worth investing in when you harness it in a way that it propels business, improves brand reputation, increases agent productivity, and helps build stronger customer ties. Organisations now, need to go beyond chatbots and cater to existing and new customers with tools that simplify the customer journey, guide them through the onboarding process and keep them engaged with real people till the very end.

Focusing on the Future of Customer Care Involves:

Understanding the importance of human interaction

Think your client is running into a technical issue or not grasping a specific guidance and afterward being trapped in the rigmarole of interacting with a bot, accepting pre-programmed messages, yet no human assistance. It isn’t the bot’s fault because there’s only so much that a bot can do.  Obviously, your customer will get irritated and drop off immediately, unlikely to do business with you again. The requirement for this human assistance has been fuelled by COVID-19 more so, particularly in areas like insurance and banking that depend entirely on online business.

Through our own experience we noticed that when Video based KYC identification was introduced in the banking and insurance sectors, along with a hike in demand for the tool, there was also a growing demand for virtual assistance by real agents. Your customer onboarding journey may start with getting a chatbot to interact with them, but eventually a real agent will need to step in, to connect over an offline call or video interaction. Chatbots cannot process empathy and react accordingly. That’s something unique to human beings.

Creating a bespoke interactive experience

Nobody enjoys the phone ringing incessantly during the wait time, especially not a customer who’s in a hurry to get his work done. Customer service providers (like us and many others) need to incorporate an IVR system that keeps the caller engaged while the agent may put him on hold for a while. This IVR system can keep the caller informed about the brand’s various offerings, the various tools they can utilise, or the assistance they can ask for. Callers can be provided with the option to chat in their local language and even receive a welcome message to add a personal touch to the experience.

Ensuring skill-based routing for agents

With current innovation encouraging Video KYC for Banks and other client support tools, calls coming through needn’t simply go to any agent accessible, but can be moved to the one most appropriate to assist. This element, known as skill-based routing, sorts agents depending on their demographics like language, areas, specialised areas and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. After the IVR has connected with the client, the line is routed to the agent most qualified to address the concern. Needless to say, this hoists consumer loyalty.

Offering CRM integration

When your online service tool is integrated with a CRM software, agents have an all-round perspective of caller information, so no matter which agent answers the call, customising the caller experience gets much simpler once all data is easily available on the screen. Apart from personal client information and call logs, agents have access to previous tickets, cases, chat transcripts and other data, which offer a comprehensive view to make client interactions more productive and viable.

Offering new services like instant onboarding, Video kyc and others certainly require new technology that’ll help businesses improve completion rate, conversion rate, overall customer satisfaction and agent productivity.

As we face this new phase of business, we must ensure that these tools and technologies are implemented in our customer service software to do business at its maximum potential and achieve the best ROI possible.

Categories
One stop video kyc solution VCIP Digital KYC solutions Video based KYC identification Video KYC Video KYC for Banks Video KYC solution providers Video KYC vendors

Hospitality and Tourism, the Next Frontier for “Video” Experiences

Hospitality and tourism, like other retail establishments, have been deeply impacted by the ongoing pandemic, with thousands and more losing their primary livelihood.

Recently, I took a flight (after a long hiatus). And stayed at a hotel. Different establishments and airports offered different experiences. One had a thermal scanning followed by holding up the boarding pass for verification. The other had me take off the mask momentarily for identity verification. A hotel staff asked me to email them my ID while I was standing at the check-in counter.

Bottomline—identity checks are important. And frustrating.

Hospitality and tourism, like other retail establishments, have been deeply impacted by the ongoing pandemic, with thousands and more losing their primary livelihood. These sectors have been adversely affected due to their high-touch, high capital-expenditure and inventory-driven model. And the falling footfalls.

Across most companies, 2020 is the year, most employees did not avail their full quota of leaves. Reason—where will we go? Even so, it would be cavalier to say that people have lost their desire to be out and about.

In fact, they are exploring novel ways to do whatever can be done safely—ordering food (instead of dining out), video-conferencing (instead of physical meetings), online learning (instead of physical classrooms), digital banking (instead of branch banking), and so on. Offices have implemented rotas and safety measures to bring staff back to the workplace, in a staggered manner. There are surveys that discuss how people want to come back to the workplace, for instance.

All this makes us wonder if it is time that customer-onboarding and check-in processes evolved in these industries. Just as banks use Video based KYC identification (Video KYC) and video interactions for personal discussion (PD), perhaps customer-interaction heavy industries, like retail, hospitality, travel and food services, should adopt these too.

For instance, it would be easy to set up auto-check-in kiosks at airports that link identity and ticket information together to issue boarding passes—with provisions for agent assistance (over video) if required. The security apparatus can maintain a safe distance while keeping us safe.

Similarly, it could be quite easy for restaurant guests to interact with the chef or the server/waiter from a distance over an assisted video conversation (to complement the QR-based ordering menus that have popped up recently).

Hotels could also decentralize the check-in process through auto-identity verification (with booking reference number) and video-based assistance consoles for support during a stay.

Conducting such a video-driven digital transformation would impact the ecosystem along four key pillars:

  • Personal experiences: It will allow us to return to a sense of normalcy faster. Videos help humanize a digital interaction that often seems impersonal.
  • Cost-effectiveness: The centralized (video-driven) support model creates efficiencies that reduces the operational cost for these establishments, against the popular belief that modernization is expensive.
  • Safety measures: It helps people stay safe in the current time and context, with or without the vaccines.
  • Organizational efficiency: The organization of customer data will eventually lead to reduced data entry errors, better personalization, better business practices, and better customer strategies.

Video embedded experiences are a great reminder of what works for us as humanity. Deeply personal and empathetic experiences that can be human, while being designed in a digital first manner—with all the efficiencies of data-driven execution, and the warmth of “service with a smile” —are something that we all look forward to.

As one of the fastest evolving industries, hospitality and tourism should also ride the digital transformation wave, and start adopting “Video”—Video-based onboarding, Video KYC, Personal Discussion, Concierge Support, Assessment—as the normative model of customer engagement in a socially distanced world.

These industries thrive on creating amazing customer experiences, and video is one of the most potent tools available during the pandemic to reach out and create a-ha moments.

This is a website blog post. Read the original article here at: https://hospitality.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/speaking-heads/hospitality-and-tourism-the-next-frontier-for-video-experiences/80005507

(Amit Das is the Founder and CEO of Think360.ai, the parent company that launched Kwik.ID)

Categories
KYC One stop video kyc solution VCIP Digital KYC solutions Video based KYC identification Video KYC Video KYC for Banks Video KYC India Video KYC solution providers Video KYC vendors

RegTech’s Rise Could Be A Watershed Moment In The Way Financial Services Engage With Customers

Banks and Financial institutions operate in a highly regulated environment; these regulations are continuously amended to safeguard the financial systems and various stakeholders, most important of them being the customer. As technology continues to evolve extensively, regulators are often playing catch-up. The balance between a Regulator’s needs and the technology excellence that keeps pushing the industry forward – is the Regulatory Technology (RegTech) space. Product complexity, diversity, evolving compliance landscape, and the need to maintain a competitive edge – demand seamless technological solutions.

Most regulators are wary of the increase in fraudulent activities including money laundering, identity theft, data breaches, cyber hacks etc., that accompany the adoption of digital channels. A personal intervention (meeting the customer in person, visiting their home or office, getting hand-signed documents, etc.) are seen as risk mitigation strategies, expensive as they are. A single customer visit adds Rs. 150-500 to the overall customer acquisition cost, and, sometimes, several days in process turnaround times (TATs). RegTech solutions (involving complex integrations, APIs, computer vision, NLP, OCR, Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) are focused on solving these challenges, without increasing the cost of regulatory compliance or the associated business risks. Interestingly, RegTech has not received as much investor attention over the last few years, as one would expect in a country like ours. This seems set to change. RegTech is well on its way to becoming the next big thing in the financial space, expected to yield an impressive sector wide CAGR and record revenue this year. 

COVID19 and its consequences have brought specific RegTech opportunities to centre stage – digital onboarding in the wake of social distancing, data privacy, personal data protection, customer interest, identity risk management, online dispute resolution, and much more.

Leveraging Video as the Future of Customer Engagement

Banks and RBI regulated financial institutions started first with Video based customer identification processes, (Video-KYC) to transform customer onboarding processes hindered by the lockdown. VCIP Digital KYC solutions allow customers to undergo a virtual on-boarding journey, without the need of any physical interaction. It also retains the personal empathy of actually speaking to an agent/ service representative over a video call so that a customer can be handheld through the onboarding process.

Extending the learning from this phase, other regulators such as IRDAI, PFRDA, SEBI etc. have also augmented their guidelines to use Video based KYC identification for customer onboarding. Many of these guidelines very clearly ease the challenges faced by the industry, while at the same time standing true to the regulator responsibilities towards protecting end-customer interest.

With Video kyc taking over the traditional methods of KYC and Video KYC India flourishing with premium Video KYC for Banks, insurance companies, Regtechs and other institutions, there is no stopping!

There is a growing school of thought around how video can be the next big thing in customer servicing, assisted/ humanized digital commerce/ and many other industry use-cases.

Filtering Customers for a Healthier Credit Environment via Account Information Service Providers

Regtech can also support Account Information Service Provision, which allows customers to give permission to banks to release account information to the AISP. This information can be analyzed as part of credit scoring, part of the bank’s decision-making process for lending, or for better product offers.

This can be done in real-time and offers a more sophisticated view of the customer’s financial position than a traditional credit check, allowing the bank to make more prudent decisions. This in turn leads to better disbursements of loans and rejection of fraudulent borrowers.

Enabling better compliance with regulatory reporting: Saves costs for banks

An important growth area for RegTech is regulatory reporting. This addresses the problems caused by multiple data sources, systems, and errors arising from manual review. A RegTech solution can compile standard comprehensive reports from multiple data points. This saves banks a considerable amount of time and effort, freeing up the workforce to concentrate on more skilled and value-added tasks. Moreover, standardized reporting is also convenient for the regulators themselves to analyze. 

Regtech not only has immense benefits for customers and regulators, it has the potential to help firms save resources at a time of increased uncertainty. Experts estimate digitising paper reporting could save billions in administrative costs. From a compliance perspective, RegTech solutions also offer Indian businesses the flexibility to and scalability needed to adjust to new global standards like BASEL 3, GDPR, critical as clients become increasingly global.

Although, the pandemic is forcing businesses towards RegTech solutions, it will likely turn into a blessing in disguise in the long-term, as the impacts of systematization, better reporting, and more flexible KYC make themselves known. RegTech is here and it is the future of the Indian finance sector.

The financial sector is all set for their digital journey ahead, being armed with cutting-edge best Video KYC tools. To gain more insight, check out – http://www.businessworld.in/article/RegTech-s-rise-could-be-a-watershed-moment-in-the-way-financial-services-engage-with-customers/29-10-2020-337105/