Measuring financial services business outcomes with Financial Services Operations
So, you’re using ServiceNow Financial Services Operations to deliver an exceptional customer and/or agent experience, and you’d like to know how to get maximum value out of the product? Let’s delve into strategies for identifying, prioritizing, and measuring business outcomes.
- Define Clear Objectives:
Start by understanding the specific business outcomes you want to achieve. These could include delivering immediate, convenient client experiences, innovating at scale with a single system of action, or digitizing siloed processes by connecting employees, functions and any core system across a bank's or insurance company’s architecture.
Once you know where you want to focus your effort, collaborate with your stakeholders to define clear and measurable goals. For example:
- Increase automation of disputes investigations by 50%
- Increase self-service by 50% in one year
- Deflect 20% of customer cases in one year
- Improve onboarding cycles by 20%
- Decrease manual workload per case by 50% in 6 months
- Improve CSAT scores by…
- Improve policy change cycle time by 40%
- Decrease claims processing time by 25% in 6 months
- Decrease redundant conversations with insurance customers by 80%
- Reduce customer onboarding time by 30%
- Improve SLA adherence by 100%
- Avoid regulatory exposure
- Decrease cost to serve customer by 25%
These goals will guide your KPI (Key Performance Indicators) selection, so make sure you are all aligned before moving forward.
- Select Relevant KPIs:
Now that you know what you want to accomplish and when, identify and select KPIs that directly align with those goals so that you can track your progress. Here are some relevant financial services KPIs:
Banking:
- Self-Service Adoption Rate: Measures how often customers use self-service options.
- CSAT: Indicates how satisfied customers are with a company's products or services. It's measured through customer feedback and expressed as a percentage.
- Reduce Write-Offs: Measures the amount of written off disputes for a bank.
- Case Deflection: Measures the strategies and tools used to help customers find answers to their questions or resolve issues on their own, without needing to contact customer support directly. This can reduce the volume of cases or support requests that reach the customer service team.
- Meeting SLAs: SLAs outline the expected level of service, including response times, resolution times, and overall service quality, and are often a critical component of customer service, IT operations, and vendor management. Meeting SLAs is crucial for maintaining customer trust, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency in a banking environment.
- Cost per interaction: At a bank, cost per interaction is a metric used to calculate the average cost of each customer interaction, whether through customer service channels, online platforms, or in-person at branches. It helps the bank understand the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of its customer service operations.
Insurance:
- Average Claims Handling Time: Measures how long it takes an insurance company to handle a claim
- Self-Service Adoption Rate: Measures how often customers use self-service options.
- Customer Retention Rate: Measures the percentage of customers who renew their policies.
- Claims Settlement Ratio: Measures the percentage of claims settled to the total number of claims received.
- Net Promoter Score: Measures customer satisfaction and loyalty based on the likelihood that customers would recommend the company to others.
- Employee Productivity: Measures the efficiency of employees, often in terms of premiums generated or claims processed per employee.
- Customer Complaint Ratio: The number of customer complaints relative to the total number of policies.
Be sure to prioritize KPIs based on their impact on the overall business outcomes. Measuring everything is not as important as measuring specifically the KPIs that helps you achieve your goals.
Choose KPIs that you can measure today, even if via manually processes. Next, once you move to ServiceNow, you can track in ServiceNow. And track improvement over time as you build deeper automation, leverage more features, etc.
- Measure and Review performance:
Now that you know what you need to track, you can use Financial Services Operations Platform Analytics Solutions to get visibility and monitor your progress. FSO applications also come with pre-built Performance Analytics dashboards that customers can extend to track performance against industry relevant APIs. For example:
FSO Customers can also use these Performance Analytics dashboards and Process Optimization analytics to drill into specific improvements at the workflow level.
Be sure to regularly track and monitor your KPIs and use historical data to identify trends and areas for improvement. Also, ensure your data is accurate and consistent so you know you are making well-informed decisions.
- Benchmark and Compare:
Benchmark your KPIs against banking and insurance industry standards and best practices. Understand what success looks like in your domain. As mentioned above, you may need to start measuring success through manual processes if not automated yet. Then once ServiceNow is configured, you can easily track performance as you configure more and more tools.
Compare your performance over time, against your competitors (if possible), and identify gaps and opportunities. You can leverage the ServiceNow platform to compare and measure improvements internally, e.g. looking at before versus after, compare one contact center performance to another, etc.
There are various organizations that offer resources to help benchmark and compare your progress against others like you: Gartner, TSIA (Technology Services Industry Association), Forrester, etc. Use all available resources to help you get a sense of where you stand.
- Iterate and Improve:
Continuously iterate on your strategies. Focus on your goals and if a KPI is not driving the desired results, adjust your approach – stay agile.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to address bottlenecks and optimize processes. Use the skills and expertise of others to work together and find solutions.
Regularly communicate progress and insights to your stakeholders, good or bad. It’s important to keep everyone informed and on the same page. They’ll appreciate the transparency and might even have suggestions to help get things back on track.
In Summary
Remember that effective measurement and optimization of ServiceNow FSO outcomes require a comprehensive approach, involving people, processes, and technology. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to helping you get the most out of your purchase, but there are plenty of resources and people that can help you along this journey.
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