Technology is a powerful weapon to increase efficiency and accuracy. However, if you apply technology in the wrong way it can create a nightmare for customers and employees. We will dive into some areas we believe trust practitioners and corporate service providers should be mindful of when applying technology.

Problem 1: Robotic customer interactions

Customers are usually happy to interact with an automated system to deal with simple tasks, such as filling a form. Sometimes they even prefer this as it gives them the flexibility to do it whenever they want.

However, when it comes to complicated problems or to sensitive ones, such as giving recommendations on how to plan their estate, customers would want to know there is a human they can speak to if they do not understand something or if they want to ask questions.

Whenever you are considering implementing technology in a customer facing process you should ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is the process easy to complete for my customer without human assistance? The technology should be intuitive and provide customers with clear guidance

2. Does the customer know the benefits for them of this process being automated? e.g.: it gives them more flexibility of when to complete the task, it will help their service be provided faster, etc.

3. Can the customer easily contact a person if they get stuck in the process?

4. Will the use of technology make the customer feel the product is of lower value? If a customer is receiving advice on their tax planning, they want to feel the advice is tailored to them - make sure the technology does not get on the way of this

Problem 2: Rigid workflows

Automating processes increases efficiency and minimizes the possibility of a mistake being made. However, some processes tend to have a lot of variability and bad automation can lead to staff not being able to proceed or abandoning the automation altogether.

Creating workflows with a defined number of steps, that do not allow for human judgment, will rarely work. Out-of-the-box standardized workflows will usually fail as every trust and corporate services company has its unique internal processes, services and type of customers. When looking for a software solution it is important to consider that your needs will evolve so the technology should be flexible and highly configurable.

We hear often from companies in the trust and corporate services industry that many of their processes are run over email, Excel spreadsheets and document folders because they have not found software that accommodates the nuances of their own processes. This is particularly common for processes such as risk scoring, KYC document collection and generation of registers.

Problem 3: Poor ROI

A very common complaint we hear from the industry is that existing solutions for AML, entity management and transaction monitoring are not worth the cost. This is understandable because, if implementing technology does not translate into sufficient time saved, fines prevented, better customer experience, etc. to justify the costs, then it should not be implemented. It is not always obvious what the value of these benefits is from a monetary perspective but an approximate assessment can still be made.

Many software providers have a base yearly license cost and additional costs for support, changes to configurations, training and add-on features. You should understand all these costs clearly and the benefits the solution will bring so you can make a well informed decision.

Conclusion

Technology is great and I believe we all have room to apply more of it to make our lives easier. However, whenever we are thinking of incorporating it we should understand common pitfalls.

At Custos we are building the operating system for trust and corporate service providers that is highly customizable and intuitive. We work with our customers to ensure that technology is applied where and in a way that benefits their business.