Kejad Insights

Author Dennis Mambure

The term digital is so broad and if not approached with soberness can mislead many a people. “Digital” as a term has been used together with a  plethora of other words, disciplines, and activities such as digital transformation, digital innovations, digital banking, digital marketing, digital strategy , digital ministry, and digital medicine. Tom Loosemore, formerly of the Government Digital Strategy ( UK) defines digital as : “Applying the culture,practices, processes, and technologies of the internet-era to respond to people’s raised expectation.”  Contrary to  common thinking, digital is about people not machines , not technologies or expectations.

One definition of innovation s “The application of new ideas to the products, processes, or other aspects of the activities of a firm that lead to increased value.” It should therefore be understood that digital innovation is not only about releasing new products, services, or solutions but rather the use of digital technologies and applications in pursuit of enhanced business processes, efficiencies, and superior customer experience.

The banking sector has experienced its own fair share of digital innovations over the past few years. In our market things like mobile banking, internet banking, Straight Through Processing  are no longer signs of  sophistication, they are standard. On the card front we are seeing the decommission of the magnetic stripe card in favour of the  EMV compliant cards, the so-called Chip and PIN , the contactless cards, fancy POS terminals, QR codes, tokenisation, and virtual cards among others. The  talking point in the first half of 2021 wasreverse billing or zero-rated apps in terms of pricing. The Zimbabwe market has also begun to enjoy some digital innovations such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. A number of players in the market have released fancifully branded chatbots which provide  services ranging from simple query  and complaint handling to transactional services. This commendable yet all these developments need to be supported by skilled people.

Any digital innovation that is done oblivious of the customer journey may be a journey into futility. The question is : Are the people trained, developed, and enabled to embrace digital innovations and  sweat them accordingly? Do we have the relevant skills in the market to scale the digital agenda into dizzy heights? 

Upskilling is mandatory for successful digital innovation

No digital innovation process can be a success without a grounded team of employees. As banks innovate, it is mandatory that the people agenda becomes a C-Suite imperative. The human capital base needs to be continuously developed. Upskilling can no longer be a catch phrase or a tick-the- box exercise, but rather a strategic pillar in innovation, as the sector goes for digital transformation. Upskilling may not only mean formal training but may include providing access to the staff to use a product or at best to include as many people in the New Product/Process Development process, allowing them to take part in testing and product piloting. This helps with improving their skills set.

Digital Culture

There are different generations at the workplace, from Baby Boomers to Gen Z. This therefore demand some form of cultural calibration for any entity to successfully go through real digital innovation or even transformation. without some form of cultural recalibration. Adopting a firm-wide digital culture is the foundation of upskilling. A lot of unlearning and relearning is necessary. Anand Udapudi  suggests that key elements and characteristics of a digital culture that need to exist in an organisation include customer centricity, data driven , collaboration, agility, transparency, and ongoing learning. This calls for upskilling of the staff. Any digital innovation contemplated by the bank requires data, so it has to be part of an organisational culture to vigorously collect, collate and interpret data at any stage of their innovation processes. Customer centricity, which is also an element that has to be brought to the forefront of everything that goes on across any organisation.  

The Customer Journey

Digital innovation does not end with the launch of fancy products, solutions, or technologies.The end game is to have a customer journey and customer experience that is as flawless and as enjoyable as possible. A trained work force is critical at every stage of the customer journey across all customer touch points. It is important that the teams in any organisation have the requisite skills to walk the customer from need awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.

At awareness stage for example, the organisation has to influence demand generation. This means that the staff need to have the requisite skills to drive that demand generation. This may mean having detailed insights of the customer. This is where knowledge of data becomes key. What does the bank know about the potential customer from different data sources such as social media, customer records, media habits  among other? By no means do we want to make our lead and demand generators data scientists, but they have to have the skill to source for, manipulate and interpret data in order to move the potential client from one phase of the journey to the other.

At consideration stage of the journey the customer  searches for a fulfilment centre or platform. The customer may experience some sort of friction for example encountering long queues, unanswered calls or bad user experience on the bank’s various digital assets. The key point at this stage is for the bank to remove the friction. This may require pre-booking, automated queuing, among others, but it takes the team to be upskilled to realise that this is an important phase of the customer journey. 

Purchase stage of the journey is equally important. The customer comes into contact with the bank. The customer begins to have a deeper understanding and experience of the bank. The entire network should be clear on what happens at different Points of Contacts (POCs).  It is at this stage that the customer engages with the personal banker, teller, or anyone in the bank. If a customer attempts to use a bank’s internet service and fails what happens? Does the bank have automated trouble shooting protocols or there has to be a person to assist? At this point in time the customer may not even know the complaint handling process so whoever he meets in the banking hall maybe viewed as knowledgeable. At the very basic everyone in the bank should have some knowledge of the bank’s products and processes.

A successful journey should end with a retained customer who is also an advocate. Staff should have the skills to identify that a process or a stage has been completed  and take the client to the next station, which is one of maintaining, serving, or up-trading him, taking him to a higher segment or to other products or service.  This stage demands knowing the digitaltools to do so. Once again use of data becomes key. Does the bank have enough tools to track or assess the customers in terms of product usage, cross sale opportunities, Customer Lifetime Value assessment, attrition , dormancy, product holding among others?

Digital demands a continuous learning culture and human resource skilling. Not only should those internal to the organisation be upskilled, no! If the regulators are not upskilled, they will frustrate progress. If the customers are not in sync with developments in the digital space , uptake may be slow. If suppliers  such as app developers, are also not moving at the same pace digital manoeuvres are delayed. Training, lobbying, exposure, marketing  among other options should all be part of the basket of efforts need to ensure that digital innovation is supported by skilled people- internally and externally.

(C) First published in the Banks and Banking Survey Magazine , 2021