Gartner's recent research shows that a majority of financial services leaders want their digital investments to drive the improvement of organizational products and services. However, relatively few leaders are satisfied with outcomes achieved in this area, with many citing IT-business alignment as a significant barrier to achieving digital initiative success. To overcome this challenge, financial services leaders should ensure frequent collaboration between IT and other business unit colleagues to support their firm’s digital progression, including alignment on digital plans, goals and measurement. Leaders should also focus on improving communication by setting up cross-functional teams, designating change champions, and providing shared communication channels for frequent touchpoints.

Many leaders find it challenging to link automation efforts to customer experience improvements. Leading firms tell us that tying automation to customer experience outcomes and growth often requires some anecdotal evidence. Finding real customer examples to illustrate automation’s impact can help expand the scope of automation and its role in the firm’s customer experience efforts and growth story. Gartner research also finds that traditional customer experience metrics, including NPS, might not be the best metrics to use moving forward. Emerging customer-experience-related metrics, such as financial empowerment support (FES) are stronger predictors of a customer’s likelihood to take positive action with a firm than NPS. Optimizing for FES leads to a 12% higher lift in customer likelihood to take positive action than optimizing for NPS, and leading firms are taking targeted actions to support financial empowerment specifically with automation.

Financial services leaders are making increasingly complex process, channel and product improvements faster and more often to remain competitive. Agile values, principles and best practices can help leaders navigate this new environment. Large, transformational projects won’t usually fit neatly into agile, lean or waterfall categories, so leaders need to work in a multimethodology world by using an application framework that considers the business processes, team preferences, team skill sets and technology toolsets involved in different projects before committing to any methodology. Stakeholder buy-in, strong change management and multi team coordination are key to building a mature agile organization for success in this rapidly evolving environment.

Gartner research shows that firms having a more formalized approach to automation decision making, implementation, maintenance and talent management, are on average 22% more likely to exceed their automation goals. Leading firms evaluate success more frequently and are more likely to measure certain metrics than lagging firms. Regardless of their goals, leading firms are 19% more likely to measure metrics periodically, as opposed to just at the beginning or end of an initiative. When compared to their peers, leading firms are also more likely to measure certain metrics, including end-to-end automation for cost optimization goals, customer effort for customer experience goals, and digitally enabled product revenue for growth goals.

Most financial services leaders tend to believe that shorter interaction times for customers translate into better customer experience. As a result, they focus their automation efforts on speed of service. However, Gartner analysis shows that customers don't necessarily reward faster interactions and there’s no correlation between faster processing times and customers taking a positive action with the institution. Instead, an automation strategy that's focused on customer empowerment support creates better value for both customer and firm. Analysing a cohort of highly empowered customers, we saw that ~70% of such customers took revenue positive actions regardless of the length of their interaction with the firm.