Customer Experience in the Digital Age: Key Lessons from HDFC Limited

The rise of the digital-first customer, disruption by fintechs and the emergence of customer service as a differentiator has caused a shift in digital transformation goals for the banking sector. Fortunately, we have access to cloud platforms that help redefine front-end, customer-facing operations, and create integrated digital customer journeys – all to ensure a great customer experience.

Driving customer-centric digital transformation for a superior experience

At HDFC Ltd, we are continually looking for ways to make the customers’ life easier.We needed a solution that could make sense of our rich customer data, amassed over the last 44+ years, and use this to drive seamless, personalised experiences. We achieved this by buildinga single, unified engagement platform equipped with a 360-degree view of data that removes all friction from the customer journey. WithSalesforce,we couldmove away from a product-centric approach and convert our data into actionable intelligence to drive 1:1 personalisation and greater business value.

Here is how we did that:

1. Unifying multiple data streams to create one simplified source of truth

By combining customer data from multiple channels and back-office systems, we create unified customer profiles accessible to all relevant internal teams. Apart from personal details, this profile includes a ‘Loan 360’ view with details around loan amount, sanction details, property details, documents, follow-ups, etc. – all in a single tab. We use this data to redefine the customer experience by:

• Understanding pain points and offering effective resolutions, intuitive self-service experiences, and information in formats that work best for the customer
• Using AI and ML technologies to enhance our credit analysis process at every level – from underwriting precision, to sending out timely warning alerts

2. Empowering employees to deliver impactful service

To deliver a delightful customer experience, employees must understand their needs better and have better conversations. Investing in the right technology allows us to enable key human resources in crucial tasks such as achieving service excellence through prompt communication, and innovation for customer satisfaction. We do this by:

• Enabling employees to address queries, requests, and complaints consolidated on a single interface.
• Using features such as automatic case routing that considers agent capacity, bandwidth, branch, and so on. Follow-up emails are automatically threaded to the same case. With simple case threading, we have reduced monthly case volumes by 40%.
• Automating workflows so that cases move easily across teams or queues. Team members get notifications by email or phone and can collaborate in a single place. In fact, using automatic email classification has improved our service efficiency by 30%.
• Using dashboards and automated reports to identify areas that can be automated or managed through customer self-service. This brings down employee intervention, freeing up valuable time.

3. Understanding the pulse of the customer to innovate continually

The insights from a data-driven analytics platform, combined with better employee-customer connection, lets us betterunderstand changing customer needs and expectations.This helps us develop new products or improvise existing ones and unlock new service formats.

For example, the younger generation wants to have more DIY digital servicing options. So, we built a plethora of such optionsacross channels, including a customer portal, a mobile app, WhatsApp, and chatbots.

Similarly, we saw an increased demand for atransparent banking experience. Today, our robust and transparent processes enable a customer to log onto the website and see what is happening with their loan application at any time.

4. Embracing hybrid for a consistent customer experience across touchpoints

Ensuring a reliable digital presence is essential to building lasting customer trust. Providing a seamless and consistent experience at offline touchpoints is also vital. With customer journeys becoming omnichannel, we are leveraging our unified platform to transform the front-end experience and make it channel-agnostic. Agents have all the information they need on a single window, enabling them to provide resolutions or solutions immediately to the customer, irrespective of the channel they are using. This ensures personalised service that enhances the customer lifecycle value.

HDFC aims to be at the forefront of the digital revolution, where we use technology to simplify and smoothen the home lending experience for every customer. With newer cloud-native technology stacks, we can easily remove all complexities from this landscape,secure and connect our data and create customer magic through personalised experiences.

Read more about how HDFC Ltd is delighting customers with exceptional service experiences.