It’s been a fact and you cannot deny it – the electronic signatures have immensely helped in accommodating two challenging forces in retail banking. What are these forces? That’s the continuing evolution towards self-service and the prerequisite for a personalized and more human interaction with customers.
Craig Le Clair , who happens to be vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research, spoke about retail banking at the recently held E-Signature Summit for Banking Executives. While sharing his views, he exclaimed that the dominance of online and mobile banking clearly mirrors the growing trend that is rapidly moving towards self-service. Meanwhile at the same time, the expectation among customers concerning a more interactive and more personalized service is on the rise.
People enjoy the feeling of being addressed by their names and enjoy the feeling of being treated personally. This perception isn’t limited to one person; in fact, people yearn to be addressed and handled with extra attention especially when they are expecting a good quality of service for what they are actually paying huge sums of money. If the banks take up this strategy as well, there’s a good chance the retail banking can become a more personalized service for all the customers, resulting in increasing their client base.
Come to think of it, how can banks actually address these competing needs all the way from online versus personalized banking to delivering a positive customer care experience without anomalies? A million dollar question! And Le Clair addressed it in just the perfect way. He cited just how customers now demand the service and expect a rapid, efficient and paperless processing and that can easily be done with e-signs.
With e-signature adoption seen an emergent business trend, it will transform retail banking in the coming years. Penny Crosman, mentioning in her recent article in American Banker, exclaimed that an electronic record, sealed with an e-sign, is easy to store and can be linked to authorized individuals that becomes easy-to-access from anywhere and at any time. It can also help customer-facing employees in regaining the understanding of their valued customers they serve.
Both bankers and lawyers have legitimately given in to this emerging trend of e-signatures universally, in fact. Penny highlighted this aspect by giving some solid examples mentioning Royal Bank of Canada that is extensively using this e-signing technology, apart from the US Bank that has already included an e-signature services to the 3,000 branches spread across the country.
Since bank representatives have loads of paperwork to manage, if the entire time goes away in just managing them and correcting any errors, then when will they get time to give attention to their customers? Practically, not enough to make them happy!
This isn’t a new concept if you think it is, in fact top 10 North American banks used already switched services to e-signatures in order to deliver a better customer experience for finance management, electronic transactions and taking care of their customers on the fly.
With e-sign technology, retail banks can improve the following banking processes:
- Manage their retail Customer Service support
- Ensure a more personalized service for opening accounts
- Administer product processing effortlessly
- Efficiently regulate the reporting procedure
With these many benefits and the gurus’ statements upon it, the probability of the success of digital signature technology is higher than anyone’s expectancy to quick evolution.
Anna Stacy has in-depth knowledge and experience of online signatures solutions. Her basic forte lies within process optimization and process re-engineering, and has a long-term obsession with e-sign. She is a leading source of what's hot and what's not in the online digital signature space.
