If you've visited the Appian homepage recently, you may have seen our new Worksocial Video. It stars our customer Bank of Tennessee, who has a great worksocial success story. At Appian World 2013, we were lucky enough to have Will Barrett, Senior Operations Officer, discuss this story in person when he presented "Worksocial Pays Dividends for the Financial Customer Experience."
The Bank of Tennessee (BoT) is a community bank in northeast Tennessee. It's a smaller bank, so they compete and win on service and the customer experience. Will Barrett, a self-proclaimed technology "geek", talked about BoT's unique competitive position. Like other community banks, they face increased competition from larger financial institutions with much larger technology budgets. Second, people aren't going into banks anymore -- banks have to proactively adapt to customer demands or fade into obscurity. Third, complex financial rules are growing daily and the burden of compliance is heavy.
The BoT's strategy is to focus on the customer experience. Experience can be broken down into two broad categories: Internal deals with operational and process components such as time, cost and accuracy; External is focused on channels and interactions, the physical end-user experience. Barrett focused on how Appian's mobile and social features improves internal operations to enhance the customer experience.
How can financial services deploy mobile and social? Barrett says there's a lot of uncertainty in the industry on how best to execute these powerful concepts. Mobile is the killer app -- with the consumerization and proliferation of smartphones and tablets, most executives and sales staff are armed with these devices. However, in the Enterprise, functionality hasn't evolved as quickly as the technology. Barrett states that organizations need to leverage current mobile technology into value-added work that goes beyond email.
The mortgage process was one of BoT's first initiatives in using Appian. It was a manual, paper-based process with too many exception paths, limited process visibility and audit trails, and bottlenecks waiting on manual routing. One error could trigger a 50%+ increase in the process time! The process was a communications trainwreck. In Barrett's experience, most high profile issues are due to a lack of communication. Enter worksocial, and a focus on mobility and social collaboration.
Mobile in the Mortgage Process
BoT didn't have to reinvent the wheel to use mobile -- they could leverage existing systems and processes. Loan officers are able to take mortgage applications on an iPad, which provides process visibility and interactions no matter where they are. Decision makers are mobilized, and able to put the focus on the customer, which results in a better customer experience.
Less focus on process + More focus on customer = Better customer experience
Social in the Mortgage Process
Social is all about collaboration. It brings together lenders, underwriters, approvers, and processors into one platform. Appian provides a unified communication channel that ties together desktop and mobile users while providing the necessary audit trail. This dramatically increased adoption and employee enthusiasm, while decreasing training times.
Business Value Delivered
- 30% faster to complete the mortgage process
- Full process visibility
- Increased data quality
- Less re-work
- Decreased training time
- Better/easier customer experience
Barrett closed out the presentation with a look at BoT's roadmap for the future. They want to add iterative enhancements to the current mortgage process, with lightweight additions and new integrations such as imaging. Next, they'll expand BPM across the organization, with a consumer and commercial loan process, and a customer profitability tool. The future is bright for the Bank of Tennessee and their customers!
Alena Callaghan
Web Marketing Manager
