How Banks Can Create A Customer-Centric Channel Experience

Making the customer the center in a post-channel world.

Getting the complete, cross-channel view of the customer is the goal of every financial institution, indeed of every company out there today. Banks strive to know how each customer interacts with them across mobile, online, call center, in the branch and every other channel, and present a seamless customer experience across all.

Achieving a customer-centric cross-channel experience will be one subject Bank Systems & Technology explores in our upcoming digital issue focused on multichannel. I spoke with Colin Eccles, CIO of Roseburg, Ore.-based Umpqua about how banks can optimize the cross-channel experience, and make the customer the center of every channel.

Eccles says it is Umpqua's target to provide a consistent customer experience that expresses the bank's brand and culture across all channels.

"That's something we believe is critically important – something consumers simply expect," says Umpqua. "It's also an opportunity to differentiate. Umpqua created a clearly differentiated experience through our store channel and store experience. The question now is, how do we bring that experience to every channel so that the customer gets a consistent experience? It has to be a seamless experience as they do business with us; whatever the nature of that business is."

Eccles says one of Umpqua's goals is for its customers to be able to open accounts in one channel, continue in another and finish in a third channel, "and know at every point that they’re interacting with Umpqua Bank because of the nature of the experience."

For more on the customer centric cross-channel experience, please download our June digital issue.

Bryan Yurcan is associate editor for Bank Systems and Technology. He has worked in various editorial capacities for newspapers and magazines for the past 8 years. After beginning his career as a municipal and courts reporter for daily newspapers in upstate New York, Bryan has ... View Full Bio