By Eugene Chng, AVP for APAC, Hyland

As organisations across the Asia-Pacific region react to new business conditions, several trends are emerging. Among these, and perhaps the most prevalent, are the need for companies to accelerate their digital transformation and let their business goals be driven by improved customer experience (CX).

The banking and finance industries in the Asia-Pacific region are – to use a slightly blunt turn of phrase – in this up to their eyeballs. Already under pressure from Fintech startups and disruptors, banks and financial institutions are under immense pressure to not only continue providing trusted, high-quality services to consumers and business clients, but to also evolve the myriad of ways that those services are delivered, and do it with deeper insights, more reliability and modern, flexible customer support.

Customers in the modern era want a seamless digital experience, with fast, convenient and reliable tools to guide them through their transactions and support interactions with the services they purchase from a vendor.

Having social media outreach, new applications providing services and offers, and fast, powerful online tools are all very well and good, but the backend services and back-office functionality within the company must be able keep pace with those new ways of servicing customers. It is no good simply putting new front-end options in place if the customer is let down by slow service delivery, unreliable support and error-riddled processes.

In essence, the organisation simply must get their house in order before going out to market with new services to counter the disruptors or face the real likelihood of failing to win and maintain new business.

Content services is one area that can have a profound impact to support digitisation and improve customer experience. A modern, advanced content services platform offers many ways to streamline and automate backend processes, while providing a more transparent view of files, documents and data. Making these business fundamentals more accessible will increase reliability and the speed of processes, and therefore go a long way towards securing customer trust.

The digitisation of documents speeds up many facets of transactional processing and other areas of the business. However, this chain of digital files requires structure, and relies upon the ability of staff to access the information they need exactly when they need it. Furthermore, information needs to be presented in a format that can be read wherever an employee happens to be, on whatever device they are using at the time. That applies to data from social media, images and files in both structured and unstructured data formats, digital forms, web searches, scanned documents and more.

This is where a content services solution comes into play, supported at the core features of an enterprise content services platform. A content services platform provides a holistic, 360-degree view of files, documents and data, presenting them to stakeholders anywhere within the company regardless of the system or storage they happen to reside in.

Advanced content services platforms also include tools such as automated data capture, which can provide greater efficiency and accuracy to business processes by automating the capture, extraction and verification of data from documents and images. This can be done across different file types, in different languages and across departments, and has the added function of providing access to key metrics and performance indicators for those processes.

On top of that, when integrated with robotic process automation (RPA), organisations remove layers of manual processing, which streamlines the business, reduces the time it takes to action documentation including claims processing, and limits manual keystroke errors.

In a sense, RPA can be viewed as a way of optimising the experience that employees and end-users have when interacting with an organisation’s information, by accelerating digital processes through the automaton of manual, rule-based, and repetitive tasks where human touch does not add business value.

An advanced RPA tool learns by recording how human users perform a process and then leverages a digital tool in the form of a ‘robot’ to perform the process going forward. This removes a lot of repetitive work spent on manual processing and leaves employees free to focus on higher-level tasks. Financial institutions are using technologies like RPA to improve transactions, as well as processes like regulatory reporting, accounts payable and receiving and document verification.

Making these back-office functions more efficient through the use of automated data capture and RPA increases the speed at which an organisation can operate, reduces errors associated with repetitive manual processing, and generally streamlines the handling of documentation.

Removing human intervention from tasks that require access to sensitive data will also reduce the risk of that data falling into the wrong hands, or being tampered with. This plays into the organisation’s risk and compliance obligations, and enables defensible audit trails and chains of custody. A content services solution also allows for the safe stewardship of that data, with automated end-of-life procedures, access control for documents and a traceable record of who has accessed data.

Looking again at the reduction of human hours spent on repetitive tasks, it is worth considering how that investment in technology is going to affect the people who now have more time on their hands. When employees move from repetitive tasks to more exciting, knowledge-based work, they generally have the time and information to expand business relationships, focus more direct attention on customer needs, and interact with one another on a higher level – which all adds intrinsic value to the organisation. It also allows banking and finance professionals to easily interact with information and systems from the field, which in turn will increase the accuracy of that information and enhance the manner in which it is used. Again, this will ultimately result in better service.

Content services is vitally important to the banking and finance sector, and provides a service which is constantly evolving and adding new features. An effective content services solution will add value right across an organisation, ultimately improving the all-important user experience and therefore enhancing positive sentiment.