The customer says that price is really the only consideration and so drives the market towards lower and lower cost products. At the same time, the customer is also demanding higher and higher performance from these same products. Will they then trade-off customer service, accepting a more ‘basic’, stripped down product in return for better performance and reducing costs? Not a chance.
So the market will belong to you if you can bring forth low cost, high performance products and offer world class customer service for free. How are you going to get there?
What you need is imaginative strategic management. And if you do, it's inevitable that sooner rather than later they're headed your way with this challenge: get the IS working faster, harder and more dynamically and cut the cost dramatically. They've developed a vision of the future which is built around a portfolio of products and services which, when delivered, will take the market by storm. No longer will the strategists be held hostage by IS. It's a revolution!
The answer is ‘straight-through’ processing, where user activity (call-centre, web browser, IFA, etc.) directly affects the one and only set of data at the heart of your machine. So, you need to reconfigure your systems to permit this new straight-through world.
The stark reality is that just about every technologist would choose to rip up their IT and start again. And that sends costs skywards, doesn't it? And dealing with the problem in refurbishment phases is ultimately even more expensive, isn't it?
Have you ever heard of ‘process level integration’?
eXii is process level integration software that can do for service businesses what ERP did for the manufacturing supply chain; improve customer service, reduce time to market, and slash overhead and administration costs. It is a new generation of componentised software systems that combine many tried and tested technologies.
It's powerful stuff. A single view of the customer – a 360º perspective of all products, interactions, transactions and events. It's a total service platform in real-time, which extends out to the extranet, web, call centre and every aspect of the organisation. Components can be picked and mixed when and where needed to reduce and control product development and administration costs. It does this by empowering the end user to configure, re-configure, and control the system to match their own business processes, procedures, intelligence and reporting requirements.
Changes to existing products can be made in hours. New products such as ISAs, stakeholder pensions, insurance products, etc. can be quickly developed – in days not months – bringing them to market faster.
It also provides a universal integration platform to allow legacy IT investment to be maximised, which ought to please the Board.
How does it work? One superbly flexible, highly configurable, universal and enormously powerful engine – eXii – replaces the several traditional and cumbersome engines you're currently maintaining for each product class. Installation is extremely quick thanks to the fact that eXii is designed specifically for the financial services industry, so there's no need to adapt or ‘fiddle’ with the software. Your legacy remains – for as long as you see fit – locked into a server role at the back end of your back office, performing mundane tasks while eXii drives your business forward.
The business strategists are instantly able to put their radical plans into effect. The new product portfolio is designed, developed, approved, tested and launched in days and weeks, not months and years. Competitors who see what you're suddenly doing simply cannot meet you in the market (unless they're running eXii too) and customers flock to the organisation who has morphed from ‘tail-end charlie’ to agile market leader in no time at all.
And what they see is an integrated, attractive and responsive marketing business which offers great value, relevant products plus great, consistent customer service via whatever channel the customer chooses to communicate.
That ought to be an innovative enough solution for the board!