..:.:: OCA - Online Consumer Advantage™

Online Consumer Advantage™

GMx Solutions' offering for Credit Unions and other financial institutions, OCA™, provides advantages for the overall operations of the financial institution including its customers. In today’s competitive environment where customers have little loyalty but high demands for customer service, a flexible website is not enough. A new generation approach to providing the customer with customer intelligence by proactively delivering instant awareness is the next generation approach to the customer service. At the same time, internal systems and staff can benefit from such capabilities by configuring an operational profile that keeps a pulse on mission critical applications or help desk activities.

The back-office of a banking institution is comprised of many systems and applications. Often, critical information is scattered across internal and hosted systems. OCA provides integration capabilities to bring together disparate systems, seamlessly. There is no requirement to make changes to existing systems. OCA provides methods for disparate systems to interface through a central business intelligence server. Such real-time services provide a cost effective approach to integration without the high costs of re-engineering and/or intrusive, 3rd party, middleware products.

There is much competition between commercial banks regarding the online banking capabilities. members are looking for “simple” and “flexible” while at the same time demand features that make an impact. OCA reaches the member, allowing them to customize the information they need and how they want to see it and how they want it delivered.

The member is given the opportunity to self-define a personal profile that includes thresholds around account balances, account usage, terms, rates, investments or market conditions. The instant a threshold is breached the member is delivered a notification to the device or interface of their choice. This includes e-mail, pager, PDA, Mobile telephone, voice mail, or instant messaging chat interface.

In addition to account analysis, OCA performs help desk automation. As incoming calls or incidents are logged, OCA can track, report and alert based on escalation levels, severity, time delays and response log-jams. Further, OCA can detect system problems to assist operators or administrators with their awareness of data center operations. As various steps of the help desk process are logged, OCA can ensure the maximum level of awareness as well as perform automated tasks to ensure quality to the customer as well as for system administrators and operators.

Suggestive selling is an important part to the banks approach to customer facing. It is also a critical part of customer satisfaction. Awareness of something that can improve the customer well being is a win-win for both the bank and the customer. As the customer performs various transactions (either online, within the bank or via the phone), OCA can detect and suggest smart improvements. Presenting the staff with instant information to present to the customer or presenting the customer with a personalized advertisement via their online session over the Internet is a competitive approach to suggestive selling while at the same time providing the customer with the best information available to make the most effective decisions.

Many banking institutions offer online bill-payment services. OCA has the capability to interact with incoming payments and notify or generate reports when a payment is made to a competing service; for example, auto loans, and mortgages. OCA can determine based on interest rates, terms, payments and other information if a better exists.

OCA is a drop in solution that does not require complex 3rd party middleware products or changes to existing applications. OCA can use existing interfaces or a number of data touch-points to gather the information it needs to determine patterns and subsequently generate actionable events. OCA is the most cost effective solution in managing and analyzing data from different systems across the enterprise.

OCA is based on GMx Solutions' innovative product, IMDS™, Instant Messaging Data Services. Real-time data is analyzed, actionable events are created and critical information is distributed to myriad of interfaces or devices.

A customer’s actions or change in account data triggers the IMDS Data Agents to review certain information and determine if it meets the criteria for packaging and distribution. A customer or account representative or administrator can configure a specific profile in which information will be delivered. The method of the data delivery can also be defined. For example, from the banking institutions online website, a customer will navigate through their account as they do today but can now specify thresholds or identify account changes or market conditions to which they would like to be informed. The below diagram shows the OCA Solution Details and describes the components of the solution.

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Increasing customer satisfaction and improving internal productivity is critical to staying competitive. Online Customer Advantage™ is a non-intrusive, cost effective approach that makes an immediate impact. The effort to deploy the OCA components is minimal and does not require changes to existing systems.