Developing a 360-degree Digital Customer Relationship

Consumer banking behavior is shifting online. Consumers now want to access their bank accounts at their fingertips, via online or mobile banking services. To the smart financial services company, online banking presents an opportunity to expand the banking relationship with their customers.

Digital Banking

In the financial services industry, the most valuable asset is information. Currently, most financial institutions in the ASEAN region are not constructed to fully utilize what their data has to offer — from source systems to target applications. Systems are outdated, inflexible and incapable of the expansion necessary to evaluate the depth of information needed for every banking relationship.

Reinventing the industry via agile technology and analytics

Big Data -- a powerful combination of analytics, computing and flexible storage platforms -- and can address these challenges. Here are some of the ways an organization in the financial services industry can benefit from analytics and agile platforms:

  • Single or 360-Degree Customer View: A Single Customer View (SCV) is an aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data known by an organization about its customers. SCV aims to create a vivid portrait of every single customer, integrating multiple service profiles such as customer demographics, transactions, interactions, and behaviors.
  • Agile Operations: Big Data replaces the information silos of the past with streamlined, agile infrastructure and a company-wide mindset to improved customer service, satisfaction, and retention.
  • Improved Customer Service: Understanding customer needs by analyzing behaviors allows the business in its entirety to remain in tune with customer expectations. In a rapidly changing market of customer preferences, knowing the customer allows organizations to maintain competitive advantage and adapt faster than their competitors.

It is especially important to companies in financial services because of the potential their information already contains, waiting to be harnessed; millions of transactions worth of data will be analyzed in a way that is functional and profitable for the bank, and beneficial for the customer.

Reinventing the Philippines' Largest Telco Network

The way consumers communicate and consume information has changed dramatically. Telcos who want to align with the rapidly changing behaviors of consumers are reorganizing their business to leverage on their most powerful assets — data and technology.

Telco data contains a lot of complexity because of its sheer amount and variety. This is what we learned when we worked on a transformation project with the largest telco in the Philippines.

Developing a proprietary big data platform

Our project involved loading data into a common platform and integrating multiple systems. Data were housed in different systems, with various levels of ownership. Collaborating with a team of highly experienced and talented professionals, we were able to build a unique, proprietary big data platform that utilizes widely-used open source tools for data ingest & loading, processing and visualization-- with the ability to process, store and analyze complex Telco data.

From legacy systems to modern operations

Beyond just installing a technology platform in the Telco, we realized it will take more than just being a technology provider to a large enterprise to begin its transformation. We decided to address challenges in a wide variety of areas, impacting the following:

  • Innovative Team: We created a small, enterprising team comprised of talented business strategists, technology professionals and data scientists. They became the data intelligence unit of the Telco called “Talas.”
  • Technology Stack: Building a technology stack on top of the proprietary platform enabled the client to manage the complexity of a communications environment with millions of subscribers and billions of data activity points across the country.
  • Cultural change: With the culture of a small startup within a giant corporation, Talas was able to champion the “digital spine” of the telco– threading together data and technology from various parts of the organization– enabling executives access to critical business information and support on how to interpret data to check on the state of various parts of their business.

Impactful outcomes

By working with us, our telco client benefited by:

  • Saving on proprietary licensing costs significantly by leveraging open source big data technologies.
  • Identifying areas of poor connectivity, initiating plans to address issues urgently.
  • Optimizing distribution channels of prepaid load to better service areas that demanded greater prepaid load.
  • Demonstrating collaboration toward a common goal within cross-functional teams, gaining attention from executives.
  • Gaining new insights from the organization’s analytics activities.

Designing an Omnichannel Shopping Experience

The retail experience is evolving beyond malls and storefronts. Today, consumers browse and shop via a combination of different channels, both offline and online. Retailers who tune into this shift in shopping behaviors are rewarded with loyalty and recommendations.

Technology as a game changer in retail

Digital technology enables customers to start their shopping journeys online. Along with this shift in consumer behavior, marketers get an opportunity to access deeper customer intelligence than ever before, by collecting the “digital footprints” consumers leave on their trail.

Every interaction that people have with technology (whether they search for information, consume media, engage with entertaining content) can be recorded, and when analyzed, uncovers insight into intended customer behavior.

Do you know in which stage your customers are in the purchase journey? Are they just beginning to search for an item or are they about to purchase a product that you’re selling? Are you present in their digital journey?

Shift in purchase behavior

In the past, marketers had a lot of power to decide on what promos to offer. Consumers go to physical stores to shop and check which items are on sale. Nowadays, consumers have access to information online, to compare prices of products across brands, read reviews, and get recommendation from their friends. Consumers have more power than before. Strategic marketers are responding to the shifts in their industries by meeting consumer where they are: online and mobile.

Retailers can redevelop their strategies with technology playing a lead role. Some ideas may include:

  • A mobile app with e-commerce capabilities can help customers throughout the shopping process: from browsing through products, saving favorite items in a wishlist that they can retrieve later, all the way to the point of purchase.
  • In-store retail technology to allow sales associates to recommend the right product based on past purchase behavior (beacon technology connected to a mobile app).

We can help you follow the customer

Amihan can help retailers develop a mobile app and web presence, and use analytics to gain consumer insights and understand what it all means for the retail business. When retailers utilize technology to support the changing habits of consumers and acknowledge the new power they possess, they become part of consumer decision making and stay relevant even when times are changing.

Innovating Patient Care Through Technology

Hospitals and healthcare companies are now investing in technology to digitize electronic medical records, manage electronic provider-to-patient communication, and fill prescriptions online. Forward-looking leaders understand the opportunities to revolutionize the industry, enhance the patient experience, and lead the future of healthcare.

Healthcare of the future

Digital plays a pivotal role in what healthcare will look like in the future. Right now, digital tools are already being used to improve efficiency and productivity in hospitals and clinics. For example, mobile technology is giving providers the ability to record and check health activities and processes on-the-go.

Data-driven and analytics solutions enable healthcare workers to monitor patient health more effectively in real time. Access to electronic health records are empowering clinicians to more easily track patient health, ensure their safety, and make medical decisions with more confidence, thus resulting in better patient outcomes.

The "Intelligent Healthcare" Enterprise

It’s easy for information to get lost or remain underutilized when they remain analog, but through digitization of patient records, health workers are able to make full use of valuable patient information. By leveraging digital technology to make patient records from different departments and systems easily accessible by clinicians, healthcare is delivered more efficiently, medical errors are reduced, and health enterprises are able to save on costs.

Transforming the leading hospital in the Philippines

Amihan has helped transform one of the best providers of tertiary healthcare in Asia. With a large workforce of 1500 medical consultants, 230 medical residents and 123 fellows, we have to think of new ways to help them manage their technology systems. Helping digitize its analog workflows, we transformed them by:

  • Overhauling their Hospital Information System, a complex central information system that manages the hospital’s operations across various areas.
  • Creating a patient-centric healthcare system that facilitated more efficient processes such as patient admission.
  • Delivering their Ancillary Results Management System (ARMS), a centralized view of all diagnostic data coming from different laboratory devices.
  • Developing the MD Portal, a next generation system where doctors can easily access digitized patient records.

Through this transformation initiative, they have significantly improved their internal capability to provision of care for thousands of patients.