I recently had the pleasure of moderating a 45-minute webinar hosted by NCR and INETCO on how ATM and IT operations teams that have end-to-end transaction visibility can improve the consumer banking experience. (A deeper corresponding whitepaper can also be downloaded here.)
The webinar featured Robert Johnston, Marketing Director of ATM Software for NCR and Marc Borbas, VP of Marketing for INETCO. These industry experts talked about how consumer service has emerged as the number one differentiator between banks, especially now that most carry similar financial service product portfolios.
They also discussed how consumers typically care about three things: consistent service quality, timely content or service delivery and security. If a bank cannot deliver on all of these, across all their various customer facing channels, they will run a higher risk of losing a customer’s trust and ultimately, their business. And this is why ATM and IT Operations teams need the ability, at anytime, to answer the question,
“How are my ATM services performing in the eyes of my consumers?”
Robert and Marc explained how this was getting to be a difficult question to answer, due to the increasing complexity of ATM networks and the agility required by ATM and IT Operations teams to manage the performance of service offerings continuously being rolled out by their banks. The inability to track the performance of a consumer’s transaction once it leaves the actual ATM terminal is translating into:
- A greater risk of undetected network communications and application performance issues affecting service availability
- A greater chance of third party hand-off issues occurring
- Longer, more costly remediation processes and third party “blame storms”
These are all things could have a negative impact on revenues, support costs, and ultimately, the consumer banking experience. The lack of consumer transaction visibility is driving ATM and IT Operations teams to identify emerging performance management requirements that include:
- Full automation of incident management
- Easy access to transaction-derived metrics to support Key Performance Indicators
- Consolidated performance management across multi-vendor ATM hardware, software and service applications
- The ability to query real-time consumer transaction data and ATM usage data
- Visibility into the individual “hop by hop” response times of an end-to-end transaction path
Robert went on to share how ATM management solutions have advanced to include automated end-to-end incident management, measures of consumer services and KPI’s, and the ability to deal with multi-vendor ATM hardware and software environments. All of this is usually delivered through a web interface. In the case of NCR Gasper Vantage and APTRA Vision, these solutions have also made it possible to forward real-time transaction intelligence alerts gathered from the INETCO Insight business transaction management (BTM) solution.
Marc spoke about how business transaction management solutions have also advanced to a point where they are now lightweight, easy to scale and easy to deploy. These network-level transaction monitoring solutions provide granular transaction intelligence and a real-time window into key events that indicate a poor customer experience, such as slow transactions, mid-stream cancellations, failures of certain transaction sets (e.g. bill payment), and time-outs.
Unlike traditional tools, BTM solutions were built to continuously monitor the end-to-end performance of every consumer banking transaction that runs through a complex, ever-changing network. BTM solutions are proven to reduce support costs, increase network uptime and availability, and improve the consumer experience by:
- Isolating issues affecting the performance of your critical consumer transactions 65% faster
- Averting service outages and improving first time call resolution rates
- Streamlining remediation processes, reducing dispatches and prioritizing incident faults
- Analyzing transaction volumes and the breakdowns by service and transaction types
- Performing analysis of consumer usage patterns and service adoption rates
Robert and Marc both agreed that together, a combined ATM and business transaction management solution provides end-to-end visibility that can be used to improve the end customer experience and meet the emerging performance management requirements for ATM and IT Operations teams.
To learn more,