What is Intelligent Customer Management?
Intelligent Customer Management is the incorporation of intelligence into client management practices to enable users to work faster, better, and smarter. Intelligent Customer Management enables banks and wealth management firms to create a comprehensive view of the client from enterprise and external data sources. This holistic understanding of the client not only enables users to personalize sales and service activities, but it provides the basis for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cognitive services to increase the efficiency and efficacy of client interactions.
With NexJ, firms can immediately leverage intelligent capabilities to improve the client experience, drive productivity, increase assets under management, and capture greater share of client wallet. Banks and wealth management firms can progressively layer on artificial intelligence using NexJ’s business process automation, data preprocessing, and machine learning capabilities to generate and act on deeper client insights.
Is Intelligent Customer Management new?
No. NexJ has always believed that every financial services firm benefits from intelligence in their customer management software and, therefore, all our products have intelligence built-in. We continually evolve our expert system with every release to extend the artificial intelligence capabilities built into our products.
Read about the evolution of our Intelligent Customer Management product suite here.
Why is intelligence important in client management?
Intelligence enables advisors, bankers, and relationship managers to work faster, better, and smarter. It enables you to be confident in your ability to differentiate your business and grow assets under management. For intelligence to be truly effective, however, firms need to leverage a complete understanding of the client.
Why is integration important?
Integration of enterprise data sources, applications, and external data sources such as social media and news feeds, is a critical success factor for incorporating intelligence into customer management systems.
Tactical products, such as siloed CRM solutions, may deliver a selection of intelligent capabilities but, without a comprehensive understanding of each client based on the totality of the client’s relationship with your company, how can you be sure that your sales and service decisions are correct? How can you meet client expectations for a personalized omnichannel experience? In a market where personalized service builds trust, and trust leads to a greater share customer wallet, every client-facing user needs the ability to tailor interactions to each client’s unique needs.
Integration also plays an important role in increasing productivity. With access to back-office systems, intelligent capabilities, like rule-based alerts, can monitor integrated systems for key client events. When users are alerted to events and prompted to take the right action, they can deliver the personalized service at scale that captures more assets under management and drives more share of wallet than your competitors.
Finally, integration enables firms to successfully incorporate machine learning into customer management. With real-time data loading of structured and unstructured data into a data lake and semantic normalization of the data to create a consistent understanding of data conflicts (e.g. legal name, nickname, maiden name), firms can quickly provision data to analytics and machine learning. Likewise, the integration enables firms to embed the results in CRM in the form of dashboards and alerts so users can take action on them immediately.
What products comprise the Intelligent Customer Management suite?
NexJ delivers Intelligent Customer Management through each of its three products (NexJ CRM, NexJ CPM, and NexJ CDAi.) Working together, our products are a cognitive app.
- NexJ CRM and CPM include AI capabilities that enable users to work faster, better, and smarter
- NexJ CDAi layers robust integration and data models on top of intelligent CRM and CPM to improve analytics
NexJ uses AI and machine learning to transform NexJ CRM, CPM, and CDAi into a continuously-learning cognitive app that leverages proven decision models to recommend the right actions and cognitive services to drive efficiency.
Firms can see immediate productivity and relationship-building results with NexJ CRM. NexJ’s intelligent CRM for financial services enables users to:
- better understand clients;
- personalize interactions to their unique needs to grow trust; and
- collaborate with them in their channel of choice.
By working faster and smarter, users are able to grow more assets under management / increase share of wallet.
Firms can further increase productivity, while improving the client experience and more efficiently meeting regulatory obligations, by layering on NexJ CPM. NexJ CPM provides AI-powered business process management integrated with NexJ CRM to streamline and automate key workflows like client onboarding, KYC, and AML. It also provides the robotic process automation capabilities necessary to surface machine learning-driven insights in CRM as prompts for revenue-generating activities.
NexJ CDAi is the data preprocessor and secret sauce for successful incorporation of machine learning into customer management. NexJ CDAi overcomes the challenges that commonly cause advanced AI projects to fail. NexJ CDAi enables real-time data loading into the data lake, semantic normalization of data to create a consistent understanding of data conflicts (e.g. legal name, nickname, maiden name), fast provisioning of data to analytics and machine learning, and it embeds the results in CRM in the form of dashboards and alerts so users can take action on them immediately.
Together, these three Intelligent Customer Management products work together as a cognitive app that enables firms to truly achieve their AI and machine learning goals, whether they be to digitize and enable omnichannel service, improve the client experience, increase user productivity, grow assets under management / increase share of wallet, or any combination of these. NexJ is the only vendor who creates this strong foundation for AI success, beginning with intelligence built into each product, enabling each product to exponentially increase the intelligence of the combined suite, and ending with continually learning decision models that recommend the right actions to grow assets under management / increase share of wallet.
NexJ’s Journey to Intelligent Customer Management
NexJ Systems provides Intelligent Customer Management software for the financial services industry. The Intelligent Customer Management suite is comprised of NexJ’s award-winning products that use artificial intelligence to improve customer service and increase productivity, and cognitive applications that use machine learning to recommend the right actions to save time and make more money.
NexJ first came to market with a smart CRM software designed to support the entire client lifecycle. With NexJ CRM, firms could create a comprehensive client view from back-office systems and data sources, seamlessly integrate all the functionality users need from AI-driven applications, and marry it with CRM functionality for financial services in an integrated desktop.
NexJ further evolved its product suite with the addition of NexJ Customer Process Management (“CPM”) to address the need for financial services to standardize, streamline, and automate common business processes. NexJ CPM leverages dynamic, run-time configurable smartforms, workflows, business rules, and approval processes to collect required client data, generate forms, complete necessary approvals, and prompt users for action. With CPM, firms can increase user productivity and improve the client experience during processes such as Client Onboarding and Account Maintenance. They can also ensure information collection, review, and reporting for regulatory requirements such as Know Your Client and Anti-Money Laundering are conducted in a consistent and complete manner.
NexJ Customer Data Analytics & Intelligence (“CDAi”) represents the latest progression in NexJ’s intelligent customer management product suite. NexJ CDAi was developed to respond to two major challenges in our target markets. The first was the difficulty in using and making sense of the massive amounts of inconsistent, siloed, unstructured, and constantly changing data held in company systems and applications, as well as data available from external sources such as public newsfeeds and social media for projects such as analytics, digital transformation and omni-channel service. The second factor was the growing desire to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning into front-office systems. NexJ CDAi ingests data from siloed sources, both cloud and on-premise, streaming and at rest; resolves data conflicts to create a harmonized view of the client; quickly provisions high quality data into analytics and cognitive services; and exposes intelligence through notifications, dashboards and insights to improve customer service.
We believe the evolution of these products and their deployment, individually or in combination, delivers the intelligent customer management capabilities that financial services firms need to provide personalized service and grow share of wallet in today’s competitive marketplace.
Building out the Technology
NexJ’s Intelligent Customer Management (ICM) products are the result of decades of experience developing and implementing customer management solutions for many of the world’s largest and most recognized financial institutions. NexJ’s award winning software allows firms at all levels of customer management maturity to take a stepwise approach to achieving their ultimate goal. Ultimately, the complete NexJ Intelligent Customer Management suite delivers a continuously-learning, cognitive application that recommends the right intelligence-augmented actions for users to deliver personalized customer service at scale and grow their business.
Top financial services firms typically start with NexJ Customer Relationship Management (CRM), for the breadth and depth of its industry-specific functionality. Leveraging innovative model-driven engineering (MDE) technology, NexJ MoDL, NexJ has evolved CRM into an integrated experience – known as the NexJ Integrated Advisor Desktop (IAD) in Wealth Management for instance – that allows firms to bring together key data and applications into a seamless, responsive, context-aware user experience without the need for data replication or synchronization. The key to the MDE approach is that the business modelling (done in NexJ MoDL Studio) is coupled to a virtual model with persistent data mapping and industry leading integration capabilities and runs on a light-weight NexJ MoDL Server. This enables NexJ to deliver a comprehensive customer view using data from across the enterprise (from behind the firewall and from the internet). Bi-directional NexJ Enterprise Synchronization for Microsoft Exchange and Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI) are both native integration modules for CRM. Version 9.x brings with it a modern user experience, informed by Google’s Material Design standards.
Building on the power of an MDE-enabled and highly-integrated CRM, NexJ adds powerful cross-system workflow automation capabilities with NexJ Customer Process Management (CPM) so that users can take action on their data. Dynamic-branching capabilities enable both guided and conversational workflow experiences, enhanced with automatic integrated data-prefill, approval routing, and document personalization with support for eSignature. Configuration is used to enable business administrators to make changes to business processes quickly and easily. Customers use CPM to unify client and agent experiences across multiple devices and applications, for processes like Client Onboarding, Proposal Generation, Financial Reviews, KYC & AML, etc.
In addition to getting data into systems easily, financial services firms also need to focus on cross-system reporting and analytics strategies. In line with this, NexJ improves upon the traditional business intelligence (BI) and extract-transform-load (ETL) approaches with semantic data normalization. NexJ builds on its heritage of model-driven engineering by providing context and meaning to each attribute (semantic meaning), independent of the mappings between source and targets. The result is a semantically normalized attribute-based data lake that is always up-to-date, and retains a full audit of all changes and the complete data lineage of each attribute. The business advantage to the NexJ approach is the ability to quickly provision new data views (semantic views) for use in reporting, but also for analytics and data sciences.
With the advancements in cloud computing, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) has become a winning analytics and data sciences strategy for financial services firms to innovate. Using NexJ Customer Data Analytics and Intelligence (CDAi), firms can quickly train and test available analytics and cognitive services in order to build decision models with a consistent, normalized data set. The process of feature engineering– identifying relevant attributes that lead to desired outputs and reducing the minimum set– is made easier because of the semantic normalization and the quick provisioning of semantic views. NexJ has always maintained that the right interaction at the right time can lead to the right client outcomes. This concept of agent-participant interactions leading to desired client outcomes is made real by CDAi. Now, firms can truly leverage their integrated data in a continuously-learning cognitive app that identifies the next best interaction for their agents to take with their clients to increase assets under management, drive share of wallet, improve client loyalty, and improve productivity. Continuous machine learning based on the results of those interactions means that the decision models are always improving, leading to better recommendations and improved likelihood of achieving those desired client outcomes.
NexJ helps financial services firms operationalize this intelligence to production by integrating the outputs of the decision models into the integrated user experience and cross-system workflows. Whether that is in the form of actionable notifications, updates to client engagement models, recommended actions, or updates to in-flight business processes – these continuously evolving decision models take the outputs of the analytics and cognitive services to drive user actions. NexJ further leverages AI to enable users to complete each recommended action more intelligently. A great example of this is NexJ Customer Insights for personalizing proactive non-financial interactions; which uses artificial intelligence to curate engaging content based on the client’s interests and integrated data profile, and enabling the agent to share this content over a variety of digital and social channels. In addition, natural language generation (NLG) is used to create highly-personalized, ultra-relevant financial review documents based on the client’s preferred communication style, financial literacy, and both portfolio & market performance.
A complete Intelligent Customer Management system also includes NexJ Intelligent Agents. The Intelligent Agents make actions even easier by extending CPM’s dynamic data capture and workflow capabilities with natural language processing (NLP) so that users can have a text or voice-based conversation with a virtual assistant to complete their actions. From scheduling and preparing for financial reviews, to reviewing the impact of today’s market updates on an advisor’s book of business and completing the necessary actions, these Intelligent Agents truly enable financial services firms to personalize service offering at a much larger scale than ever before.
