Breaking Down Organisational Silos in Financial Services Industry

In the big, wide world of finance, organisations have always strived to stay ahead of the curve, anticipating market shifts and meeting the ever-changing needs of their customers. However, over time a black hole has emerged within the system for most businesses in financial industry, which is detrimental to their growth plans, employee productivity, and overall customer experience: the existence of organisational silos.

‍Prevalence of Organisational Silos in Financial Industry

When departments within a financial institution function in isolation, resulting from limited communication and collaboration, it leads to organisational silos. This fragmentation can impede innovation, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. In the financial services industry, a sector that thrives on agility and adaptability, the consequences of these silos can be particularly damaging.

Let’s take the example of the phone banking team within a retail bank. If this team operates in isolation from other departments like credit and debit cards, mobile banking, net banking, or loans, the support agents may struggle to resolve customer issues promptly and effectively. In a siloed environment, support agents might not have access to the necessary information or resources, leading to unavoidable delays and poor customer satisfactions. By breaking down these silos and fostering collaboration, financial institutions can improve service quality and achieve greater operational efficiency.

But things are not as easy as they may appear at first glance. Ever wondered why organisational silos proliferate in financial services? The reasons are manifold.  

Regulatory pressures and the need for specialised expertise often lead to the creation of distinct departments, each operating in their own ecosystem. Complex legacy systems and entrenched processes further aggravate the issue, making it challenging to forge connections between disparate teams and data.

Organisational silos can manifest in many ways across a business.

As the financial landscape evolves at a breakneck pace, organisations must acknowledge and address these silos to remain competitive. By fostering a culture of collaboration, harnessing the power of technology, and streamlining processes, financial institutions can break down these barriers and unlock their true potential. In the race to innovate and excel, the dismantling of organisational silos is not just a lofty goal – it is a necessity.

The Hidden Costs of Fragmentation

Organisational silos are more than mere structural inconveniences; they can have far-reaching consequences on various aspects of a company's operations. Let's explore the impact of silos on customer experience, team collaboration, workflow efficiency, compliance, and risk management.‍

1. Customer Experience

Silos hamper the ability of a business to deliver a seamless, consistent customer experience. With disjointed teams and limited cross-functional communication, addressing customer issues and enquiries becomes a time-consuming and frustrating process. Silos also hinder the sharing of customer feedback across departments, thwarting improvements, and innovation. ‍

2. Team Collaboration

In a siloed organisation, collaboration suffers as teams operate in isolation, focusing only on their specific tasks. Furthermore, data compartmentalisation leads to missed opportunities for cross-functional problem-solving, idea generation, and leveraging diverse individual perspectives to drive innovation.

3. Workflow Efficiency

Silos create inefficiencies in the workflow, as information bottlenecks and a lack of standardisation lead to duplication of effort and wasted resources. Streamlined processes and coordination across teams become challenging, hindering the business’s overall productivity.

4. Compliance

In industries with strict regulatory requirements such as financial services, real estate, and hospitality, silos can compromise the state of compliance. Inadequate communication between cross-functional stakeholders may result in the organisation overlooking critical regulatory changes, leading to costly fines and reputational crisis. ‍

5. Risk Management

Effective risk management depends on accurate, timely information and coordinated action. Silos obstruct the flow of crucial data, making it difficult for businesses to identify and mitigate risks in a proactive manner. This fragmented approach leaves businesses vulnerable to financial, operational, and reputational risks. ‍

Strategies for Breaking Down Silos in Finance Industry

Team collaboration is vital for organisations seeking to break down silos and harness the collective strength of their employees. By implementing best practices, businesses can unlock new levels of innovation, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Here are some key strategies to foster cross-functional collaboration:

1. All-in-one Communication Suite

Adopt a comprehensive, unified communication platform to enable seamless collaboration across departments. From instant messaging, and audio and video conferencing, to file and screen sharing a unified communication suite can facilitate real-time conversations and data exchange, ensuring everyone stays connected and informed.

2. Unified Customer Identity

Most businesses struggle to identify their customers across various touchpoints. This disparity leads to duplication of customer identity within system and wasted efforts from your team. The ability to identify a customer across various touchpoints not only eliminates siloed viewpoint but also helps to eliminate security risks and streamline the verification process, achieving work efficiency.

Let’s understand this with an example. Let's image a customer who approaches your business through one of the social channels, and the agent serving the customer is immediately able to verify the identity of the customer with a one-time password sent on their mobile phone along with social media identifiers.  

The rich data such as the context of the customers’ pain-point and their interaction history can continuously improve their experience and help the business to deliver more customer-centric services and products.

3. Sharing Workload with Smart Routing

96.3% finance professionals believe digital transformation enables them to work closely with other departments within their organisation.  

Let’s go back to phone banking team’s example, if an agent receives a call from customer who is interested in applying for a personal loan, what do you think the agent should do?  

a. Ask the customer to visit his bank’s home branch to fill and submit the application form.

b. Ask the customer to apply to the loan department directly via email.

c. Invite a personal loan expert to join the call and take the discussion forward.

Most of us would choose option ‘C’ for obvious reason. It doesn’t require the customers to repeat their request. The phone banking personnel will either brief the loan expert or give him context during the audio conference. In either scenario, the customers will most probably get a satisfactory result within one phone call.  

A unified collaboration and communication platform empowers you to intelligently distribute tasks and workload across teams, based on factors like expertise, availability, and priority. This approach ensures resources are utilised optimally and helps prevent bottlenecks in the workflow.  

4. Bridging the Action-to-insight Gap

Foster a culture of data-driven decision-making by connecting insights and actions. Ensure that relevant data is accessible to all teams and encourage the use of shared analytics from connect systems to formulate sound strategies and drive continuous improvement.

5. Integrating Business Tools Under One Unified Platform

Streamline operations by integrating various business tools, such as communication, CRM, project management, CMS, and marketing automation software into a single platform. This convergence simplifies processes, eliminates redundancies, and enhances collaboration across organisation, while giving you a 360-degree view of customer needs, behaviour, and drives.

6. Real-time Analysis at Scale

Equip teams with the ability to analyse data in real-time, enabling them to identify trends, spot for cross-sell or up-sell opportunities, and address issues as they arise. This agility allows organisations to adapt and respond to evolving market conditions, keeping them ahead of the competition.

How CINNOX Can Enhance Your Financial Services Customer Engagement

CINNOX empowers financial institutions to revolutionise their customer engagement strategies by unifying the power of people, data, AI, systems, and touchpoints into a single ecosystem of connected experiences for customers and teams. This enables financial businesses to stay ahead in the ever-evolving digital business landscape.

1. Unified Platform for Omnichannel Financial Services

CINNOX combines all customer touchpoints into one easy-to-use, unified platform, ensuring a consistent and seamless customer experience across channels such as voice, video, chat, email, and social media among others for customer interactions and internal cross-functional collaborations.

2. Integrated Financial Network

CINNOX combines identity profiles, data, AI, systems, and touchpoints in the financial services sector into a single, seamless interface. This integration allows for streamlined workflows, enhanced collaboration among teams, and a more efficient exchange of information. By breaking down siloed practices, our solution provides a convergent ecosystem to improve both customer and employee experiences, leading to increased satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth.  

3. Collaborative Ecosystem

CINNOX enables your customer support agents to pull in members from other departments such as sales, product, net banking, loans, etc, facilitating faster enquiry resolution and a more streamlined experience for your clients. A unified dashboard also helps your cross-functional teams to have an inclusive view of the customer journey and use the collated data to build personalised experiences.  

4. Contextual Data Visibility

CINNOX breaks down data silos by providing complete visibility into customer journeys, their financial needs, preferences, and motivations. By integrating CINNOX with other existing business tools, your business stands to gain a comprehensive view of customer data that can empower your team to make data-backed, informed decisions to improve customer satisfaction and drive business growth.

5. AI-driven Self-service Solutions

CINNOX's AI-powered chatbot helps streamline self-service options for customers and reduce manual efforts for your teams, allowing your financial advisors and other internal team members to focus on higher-value tasks.

6. Offering Global Support

CINNOX equips financial institutions with the right capabilities, like smart routing, real-time chat monitoring, and real-time performance tracking and analysis, among others, to engage clients around the globe while operating from a single location. This ensures a consistent and personalised experience for customers, regardless of their geographic location.

7. Security and Compliance for Financial Services Industry

CINNOX is designed to meet the highest security standards and compliance requirements for the financial industry, allowing your business to focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences with confidence. ‍

8. Real-time Actionable Data Visibility

By connecting CINNOX with other existing business tools frequently used by your teams, your business stands to gain a comprehensive view of customer identity and behaviour that can empower your teams to make data-backed, informed decisions to improve customer satisfaction and drive business growth.