Across nearly every industry, customer service plays a critical role and directly correlates to the success of most businesses.
This is especially true for banking, which is in a constant state of change with regulations, technologies, market disruptions, and lots of competition. The one that part of banking that hasn’t changed is the need to provide a great experience for customers.
According to a recent study from Qualtrics, customers will leave within 14 months if they don’t have a good experience.
Additionally, poor service is among the top reasons why customers choose to leave their bank.
Today, most banks are leveraging technology to enhance the banking experience for their customers. Extraco Banks is a community bank that realized this need to improving customer experience and its processes by investing in digital process automation for wide deployments.
Improved process, improved experience
Extraco Banks (an acronym for Exporters and Traders Compress) is the largest and most comprehensive independent financial institution in central Texas with more than $1.5 billion in assets and 120,000 customers across 15 branch locations.
In recent years, Extraco Bank began investing in technology and process automation tools to improve many of its older and manual processes, and ultimately improving customer experience.
Efforts to improve processes bank-wide have been led by Cal Stevens, vice president and business process improvement manager at Extraco.
“We want to find manual processes that bog down our employees’ time and create a new process that meets today’s business need. These are the process that don’t add a lot of value to job design, and by automating them we can give our employees back time to focus on higher value tasks, that make a bigger impact for the bank and our employees.”
– Cal Stevens, Vice President and Business Process Improvement Manager at Extraco Banks
Manual review leads to delays
One of the most manual processes at Extraco Banks was approving remote deposit capture (RDC) requests. The bank’s 15-person call center team was responsible for reviewing all RDC requests in addition to fielding incoming customer calls and inquiries.
While the RDC request process was simple, it took a while.
- Customer requests RDC permission through the bank’s app
- Call enter employee to run a qualifying report on the bank’s application portal of the individual to determine their risk level based Extraco’s set parameters
- Information from the core system then copied and pasted into the FIS port for the individual’s risk score
- Depending on the score, the employee would adjust settings around the number of checks and the dollar amount that customer can deposit per day
- Call center employee then approves or denies the request and the customer is notified
The process itself just took five to seven minutes per request, but the call center team could only check for and complete RDC requests twice a day – at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Often, this left customers having to wait hours, sometimes days, to know if they were approved for remote deposit capture.
The slow drawn-out approvals resulted in calls into the bank’s call center, with remote deposit capture requests ranking as one of the most common complaints.
Nintex RPA expedites customer requests
Extraco Bank worked with Nintex to build a solution in just 12 hours. Now, a Nintex RPA Botflow™ checks the online portal for RDC requests every hour and processes any existing requests. Customers no longer need to wait until Monday morning for an after-hours request on a Saturday to be processed.
Automating the RDC requests with Nintex RPA will save the bank an estimated 1,200 hours a year.
The Nintex RPA solution also paid off in a way that Extraco had never anticipated.
When its branch locations closed due to COVID-19, RDC requests increased four times its daily average, and traffic into call centers was up three times.
Thanks to the Nintex RPA solution, Extraco’s call center staff didn’t have to leave the phones to process RDC requests and could focus full-time on serving those customers that called in for help.
Customer experience is the biggest differentiator for community banks from their national competitors. With Nintex automation, Extraco Bank’s call center employees can remain focused on helping their customers when they need them most.
Read the case study to learn more about how Extraco Banks has invested in improving customer experience with Nintex RPA.
Interested in learning more about the Nintex Platform and what your organization can accomplish with it? Request a live demo.
