Monitor real users for complete operational resilience
Excellent service means knowing at any given point what it’s like to be in the customer’s shoes: Operational resilience makes sure it can happen.
The Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) operational resilience regulations require firms to ensure their systems are always optimized, and that customers can access services at any time. So, to be truly operationally resilient, firms need to adopt a customer-first mentality at all times in order to know what it’s truly like to be on the front line.
Since its inception, the FCA has imposed substantial penalties for organizations’ failure to meet requirements, in some instances, fines of up to £50 million have been levied due to failings. Fines of this size not only highlight just how seriously the regulator is taking this but also that the era of bare minimum compliance is now over.
Most recently, new rules for financial services firms further emphasize the desire to protect customers. The Customer Duty sets higher and clearer standards of consumer protection across financial services and requires firms to put their customers’ needs first – at all times.
Real user monitoring leads to better customer experience
The main objective of operational resilience is to identify potential problems in a firm’s IT systems and services before they occur, and to develop a plan to either mitigate their impact or to allow the firm to quickly recover with little or no disruption to the customer experience.
Monitoring is key to this. The right performance monitoring practices can both ensure regulatory compliance, and lead to better end-user experiences. It’s important to monitor the steps that make up a customer’s transaction journey, for instance, all of which can be susceptible to failures that can affect satisfaction.
Monitoring critical workflows such as logins, balance checks, deposits, and money transfers can offer a firm assurance that everything is working as expected. From the customer’s perspective, the transactional journey is seamless.
To truly understand the view from the front line, however, firms need to collect data from users in real-time. Without this, they will be unable to develop the models of behavior they need to devise procedures for mitigating and recovering from the effects of any incidents that might arise.
By harnessing actual users’ experience of a firm’s website, a real user monitoring (RUM) solution can quantify the performance of that site’s performance, from wherever it’s accessed. By gaining and analyzing important metrics from a local perspective, a firm can then mitigate and recover from incidents that might be affecting a particular user or group of users.
Customer-first mentality
With operational resilience more important than ever, firms today must monitor the performance of their local sites and services from a user’s perspective. Only by taking a view from the customer’s point of view can firms truly be operationally resilient – and give consumers the best service possible.
You can read the original article in IFA Magazine here.
To learn more about how ITRS can help you keep putting your customers first.
