Standard Chartered: The Digital Bank with a Human Touch

“Our position as a leading international financial services provider gives us a unique perspective of the global market, including trends and changing behaviors. The one thing we’re seeing among consumers across every location and demographic we serve is the desire to better control the banking journey using intelligent and flexible digital capabilities.

It’s our mission to stay in step with our clients’ fast-paced, digitally-connected lives to make banking easier for them. That means redesigning banking to be truly simple, convenient and secure", says Stuart Beaumont, Global Head of Voice & Virtual at Standard Chartered.

As a leading global financial institution, here’s how Standard Chartered leveled up its digital transformation with Avaya…

Omnichannel: Beyond the Facade

One of the most important things for Standard Chartered is the ability for clients to communicate using their channel of choice: voice, text, seamless self-service, etc. “We recognize that phone is becoming less preferred with the rise of channels like chat, messaging and social,” Beaumont explained. “Yet this doesn’t mean voice is going anywhere anytime soon. Research shows that customers prefer speaking to a live person for more complex transactions or interactions, which happens often in banking.”

Yet just as important as providing communication options was the ability to enable frictionless, full-service banking across all channels. In other words, delivering personalized and consistent service regardless of what channel a customer uses to initiate or escalate a conversation. “There’s a fine line between truly seamless omnichannel and smoke and mirrors,” Beaumont explained. “There are a lot of things to consider, especially in the banking sector. You need every interaction to be fully secure and authenticated with the right level of data management, and you need to maintain the context of every conversation as customers switch channels along their journey.”

Digital Banking with a Human Touch

“We can’t deliver truly easy service if we don’t have a personal understanding of, or connection to, our clients,” said Beaumont. “We needed to understand things like where customers were starting their service journey or trends in how they preferred to reach out (i.e. mobile, online banking, Facebook). We need to be where our clients are, so we needed to consider all of these variables.”

As such, the organization placed a focus on digital banking with a human touch. For Standard Chartered, this meant high channel availability, repeatability across markets, and clear integration with the contact center which is often the last resort for a client. The banking provider also needed a more flexible, adaptable platform that could easily cater to new channels— even ones that have not yet emerged. This also meant support for more sophisticated technologies that could dig deeper into the customer journey and derive key insights for improvement.

“Sophisticated technology such as speech analytics and AI are becoming more prevalent, and that means financial services institutions will need to get better at mining data from past interactions and transactions to build clearer pictures of their clients,” Beaumont explained.

Another key element to achieving this human touch was empowering those people entrusted to deliver it. “We couldn’t expect deeper client connections when our employees were using outdated workplace tools and fragmented agent desktops.” Beaumont explained. “To maintain frontline productivity and increase overall satisfaction, we knew we had to unify communication channels at the agent desktop. In this industry we sell trust and advice. We can’t properly do that without technology we trust to use.”

Why Avaya

Standard Chartered decided on Avaya Enterprise Cloud™ to address these challenges, specifically a managed private cloud model. “We had to do something different,” Beaumont said. “We have contact centers in many countries and numerous contact center platforms to manage. Managing disparate platforms can be costly and can jeopardize the client experience. We felt there was a better way.”

“Public cloud was not a model that was yet suitable for us when weighed against our business and client requirements. Avaya Enterprise Cloud™ created the global platform we needed, while ensuring optimal security and data privacy.”

“The solution has a great design, and the managed services that Avaya offers allows us to consume the service as we go, paying only for what we use. We can also scale extremely quickly and deploy across different country contact centers in an efficient matter. As an international services provider, this is huge for us. Avaya also offers a consolidated desktop view for agents to gather relevant customer information, personlize prompts, and streamline management of digital channels and devices. That’s a win-win.”

In the end, Avaya was chosen due to its proven track record within the banking industry and ability to offer a personalized path to cloud adoption that made the most sense for Standard Chartered. “Their solution was simple, easy and can transition to public cloud if or when we’re ready. Avaya also has solid experience in managed services, so they really ticked all the boxes for us.”

In the End

Digital communications will continue to become smarter, simpler and more personalized as customers seek convenient yet secure ways of banking. For Standard Chartered, digital transformation is not just about transactions but driving meaningful connections and relationships.