In one of my recent assignments, I was surprised to hear the CEO of a large financial institute, critically criticizing his employees on how they are calculating their system’s availability! He was totally upset about the way they’re conducting such a calculation! They were simply checking the physical availability and uptime of their systems, ignoring the percentage of users that are using the system, and even ignoring the complaints of their clients on social media! this argument enticed me to write up this article. I think we will all benefit from such an experience.

Intro and history of online services:

The infamous way to report the availability of systems across ALL-Channels is by checking the availability of the hardware uptime/load balancer/s, backup solutions, and the availability of the software itself. In other words, the old way, or shall I call it the obsolete way of checking the availability of a system is if it’s up and responding or not!

Most professionals and technical peers, think of systems availability as if it’s only the uptime of the systems, and high availability from a software and hardware perspective only! But in reality, the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance) are all in the business to capitalize on their assets. Such businesses survive by providing top-of-the-line financial services/solutions to their clients, and capitalize by on-boarding high-value customers, cross-selling, or up-selling new services to their current clients. Thus, bankers got intensive homework to do prior to promoting a service to a client! , first, they need to check if such the service will fit the needs of certain clients since each and every client has different needs. Moreover, it’s very important to point out that the onboarding of high-value clients is a costly process, so they don’t want their customers to churn!

The new era of doing business:

Based on the previously mentioned points, and the extensive competition between Financial institutes, FinTech’s, Neo-Banks & Challenger banks, and telecoms, such BFSI institutes need to change the way they check the availability of their systems. In other words, are their systems addressing their customer’s needs, behaviors, or is their corporate message reaching their customers across ALL-Channels appropriately?

4 Reasons your system’s availability is totally wrong! and here is why!

It’s time to re-think how we are calculating the uptime and availability of our systems! it’s time to address your customer’s needs. At the end of the day if you are not addressing your customer’s needs, then you are wasting your resources and efforts. If you want to calculate your uptime or availability from an IT perspective, then your business will not thrive, and no one will use your systems!

1- User behavior:

It’s extremely important to keep your systems evolving to meet your customer’s behavioral needs. So, try to expand your system’s health check report to include such data/information. This information will be extremely beneficial for the enhancement of your systems, plus you might drop certain services and replace them with other more important ones, and all of this depends on your customer’s behavior. Or you might optimize your systems to address the behavior of certain clients. By following such steps, you’ll end up increasing the overall usability of your systems.

2- User Experience:

User experience is a critical aspect to the success of your overall systems usage. Thus, it’s vital to keep checking for abandoned services or transactions. Plus, it’s important to investigate the reasons behind such abandonments. By doing such an investigation, you’ll be able to uncover any obstacles that your clients are probably facing on a daily basis. Maybe your customers are dealing with complex interactions, which preventing them from conducting their transactions. Or maybe the system performance is not up to your customer’s expectations, or it could reveal other complex functionalities.

For example, You can check how often your customers are using their mobile application to do an ACH fund transfer?

Or another example: Are your customers leaving you because you don’t have services, which your competitors are providing?

3- Social media feeds!

Today, social media is the largest global market. This market has no boundaries, and those who played in this domain had gained immensely. Many of the corporates forget the criticality of checking the complaints (or suggestions) of their clients on social media. It’s not all about negative comments! I think it’s important to check the positive comments as well to keep doing what’s best for your customers.

But taking into account the negative comments, and work diligently to address them, is very critical for the thriving and growth of the business. Addressing such comments shall be on multiple dimensions, from the social feeds responses all the way to the systems level. Subsequently, if you don’t address your customer’s needs, then their satisfaction will drop, and they’ll end up taking their business somewhere else.

So, in other words, check our customer’s feedback and overall satisfaction, and this part will assist you in enhancing and revamping the user experience/journey and thus address the user needs.

4- Your Marketing message!

The only way to evaluate your success is to check your marketing message penetration. Thus, you can check such penetration by checking your audience behaviour and usability to your e-channels. In plain english; are your customers getting the proper marketing message from your firm?

Plus, are you able to provide them with a specific tailored offer that will address their daily needs, and enhance their overall user experience?

To accomplish the above, you can set a list of listeners, some of them will be listening and providing you with the overall customer’s wants and needs, plus your audience’s overall sentiment. A list of KPIs will be enormously beneficial to measure your overall success.

So, which tools shall you use? In most of my posts, I’m technology agnostic, since what may work for someone might not work for others!. But, hit me with a line if you need any advice.