Platform Conversion & Customer Experience

Announcer  00:05

Okay, welcome everyone to today’s webinar titled, platform conversion and customer experience. This is Brian from Strategic Treasurer. And we’re pleased you could join us as we consider the nature of platform changes, as well as leading practices to support the success of treasury system and digital platform conversion projects. But before I introduce today’s speakers, I have just a few quick announcements. Zoom offers several different ways for us to interact today. If you would like to post comments or questions viewable by all attendees, please use the chat icon in the toolbar. If you’d like to ask your question to just the presenters, please use the q&a icon in the toolbar. You can ask your questions at any time during the presentation, and we’ll try to get to as many as we can. But if we don’t get to your question, someone from our team will gladly follow up with you. There will also be a few polling questions throughout today’s webinar where you will be able to select your response from a list of multiple choices. You will need to click the submit button on the polling questions to have your response recorded. If you are here for CPE credits, you will need to answer at least three polls today. And last, please ensure that your zoom display name includes both your first and last name, so we’ll know to whom we should send the credits. Our speakers for today are Steve Traut, Senior Vice President of Sales at Superior. And Craig Jeffery, Founder and Managing Partner of Strategic Treasurer. welcome Steve and Craig. And I’ll now turn the presentation over to you.

 

Craig Jeffery  02:15

Thank you so much, Brian. And good morning, Steve. I know you’re on the West Coast. I’m on the East Coast. And through the magic of the internet and zoom, we cannot see each other face to face account.

 

Steve Traut  02:26

Yeah. Good morning. Happy to be here.

 

Craig Jeffery  02:30

Oh, that’s great. And yeah, and welcome, everyone. I’ll add my welcome. And our greetings to you. Thanks for joining. We know you have a lot in your day. And we’re appreciative you’re spending some time with us I’m really excited to have Steve on.  Steve is has already been introduced and Superior they as a as a company, they do a number of things, including helping banks in particular go through conversions and managing the all of the activities that go on there. And so he has a lot of great insight. We’ve talked a number of times, and it’s a good topic, I think whether whether you’re a banker, just looking to learn or your corporate understanding how these things go on, there’s a lot of good information. But with that, you’ll see what we’re going to be covering as we go through it. So here’s our agenda. This is our what we’re going to be covering our table of contents for the next 57 minutes or so. I’ll just give you a quick run through on these. So context is there’s the inevitability of change if you’re a banker. Just want to make sure it’s my is my audio going static, or is it just is it wrong? I hear? You can hear me okay. All right. So, yeah, pop those in the message. That’s that’s good to, to know, in case it’s something I did move my mic up a little bit higher. So thank you. But as we look at context, there’s this inevitability of change in that there are demands that banks add new services, rearrange their portals, you acquire their companies, and then there’s some consolidation and collaboration. And to stay current on the payment front. There’s all kinds of activities. So there’s this inevitability of change. But then there’s conversion challenges, what is what is challenging to make these conversions, whether it’s a platform, it’s a portal, change its hardware software in the field, there’s internal challenges that a bank has to go through, and we’ll talk about some of those. But there’s also this interface with clients. And there can be a lack of communication and a lack of understanding that can be a forgotten part of the activity. And so we have that little that’s an iceberg conceptual iceberg there that that top piece can sometimes be forgotten because there’s so many changes that occur behind the scenes, that that top piece of dealing with your clients effectively is so important. And then we move on to to Section ones that dovetail with each other one is navigating change. And this is where Steve will share some of the principles for how we should think about that. As for those who are bankers, how you think about your clients, the process of change, hitting it in some different ways. There’s some managing principles and leading practices that that we’ll discuss, he’ll share some case studies or examples that drive those points home at the end, and then finally, we’ll tag team and share four takeaways or thoughts that you can leave today’s webinar are with so with that, we’ll get into our content. So, you know, when we think about change, as you think about change, it’s always good to have some quotes. And, you know, just just a few things, you know, change before you have to why why is that? Why is that important? Why is that something we should be thinking about? We, our change will come upon us, whether, whether we like it or not, and so if we can get ahead of change, that makes a significant benefit. The other thing too, is, you know, Charles Kettering says the world hates change, and is the only thing that is brought progress. And I, there’s other quotes here that you can think of as well, one, one thing, Steve, that always comes to mind is, if I’m making change, that’s better than if change is being brought upon me. Right? If, if you’re driving the change, it’s a little easier to adapt to. But it’s a way of life. You know, and so those are, those are just a couple of quotes about change. Steve, I know, I was just gonna jump on the next slide. But did you have any, any favorite, any favorite quotes on change?

 

Steve Traut  06:44

Well, I didn’t know who Charles Kettering was. So I had to look that up last night. And for all you out there, he has 186 patents, and he was a founder of Delco. Which, responsible for the electric car commission, if you didn’t know that, there’s a little tidbit for you.

 

Craig Jeffery  07:02

That’s awesome. Excellent, thank you. So some other quotes for you to read at your leisure and, and the deck will be provided. But part of that part of that background on this, you know, is a willingness to move. And, you know, companies need good products and services relationships are important, are very important. Credit relationship is extremely important. And yet, here’s a here’s a result from one of the surveys where we see, you know, moving to full electronic processes is important enough for us as a company that we would move to another bank and our credit facility 31% would move to someone else who lends the money, almost 20% one and five would move activity to a non bank provider FinTech, you know, the idea of I want to be more efficient, I will, I’m willing to move that’s 19%, that’s still fairly significant, or I’d move activity to a bank who’s not in the credit relationship and other 10%. So that’s not saying that credit is unimportant credit is extremely important. But even with that people are willing to move if banks don’t keep up. And so that provides some of the some of the background there for this willingness to move. And that’s really the context of what we’re talking about. And I’ll start here and Steve, continue the discussion. But this technology shifts are inevitable. There’s progress, there’s mergers, there’s acquisitions, if your bank is not developing, there wouldn’t be any changes. If there’s no changes, you’re not going to be able to keep up. And if you’re a bank, you need to deliver, you know, more controlled services, more efficient services, better developments over time. And so these are some of the inevitable shifts. See, well, I’d like you to jump in to highlight any of these items that you wanted to talk about.

 

Steve Traut  08:48

Yeah, we’re seeing it. You know, we have clients across the country, and every single one of them has some kind of project on the roadmap in the next few years, if not occurring now. Either an online banking platform upgrade or a change in vendor, that maybe it’s acquisition. But there’s there’s a lot of activity out there to enhance their solutions and bring greater value to their clients. So we’re seeing it for sure.

 

Craig Jeffery  09:19

Yeah, so at some of the areas you look at, you’ve got the little green finger poking user interface. The user interface may change, you might have an update to your user experience, or to the website where people log in, or here’s a process that’s better. These are these are changes that get rolled out to an entire audience. And even if things are, shall we say, oh, it’s all intuitive. There’s quite a bit that goes on. It’s like it’s not intuitive. People don’t spend a lot of time on activities. And so these these tech shifts are inevitable. And there’s certainly some some impacts across the board. We’ll talk about pain points later.

 

Steve Traut  09:59

Yes. sign up. And I’ll add Craig, just from a, we’re seeing a lot of requests for supportive browser changes, security certificates, File Transfer Protocol, you know, changes that will impact clients. So those are things that we’re getting asked, Hey, can you assist us with these type of events as well, if it’s in reasonably positive pay, helping clients extract files from their ERP to support the positive pay product, so all those type of things, technology changes and security enhancements are driving activity in the space.

 

Craig Jeffery  10:43

Yeah, from from the user interface or deposits of pay, like you said, if you look at the bottom, you see connections and integrated, or embedded banking, this is allowing people to do some banking, within other applications in the place, perhaps closest to where the work is, or the decision is made. So these, these tech shifts are inevitable, these tech shifts impact people, they impact underlying processes. And so there’s the the repercussions there. You know, and a lot of people are thinking, hey, I’m glad there’s a poll question that we can respond to. And so that will pop up on your screen. And so this is for those who are new. And a reminder, those who have taken it before us, because the boxes are rounded squares, you can select any or all that apply. So this is regarding a platform change, a major change. It could be your portal, it could be underlying bank, your DDA platform or your ACH network? What is your situation? Do you have a platform upgrade underway? Do you have something that will be done within 12 months? Is there something within that 24 months, it could be all three, or I’m unsure? I don’t know when that’s going on? Maybe you’re new to the bank? Or maybe you’re maybe you’re not a bank? Or a corporation, if you’re a corporation, and you know, you have changes for your banks, once you go ahead and answer the questions. If you know that’s in a bank. For those who are also new, you’re wondering why people are taking the word poll in the chat box. So if we have, let’s just say if we have 100, I’m going nice today, 100 people type in the word poll, then we will send the results of the poll out in within the within the document when the time comes. So we just have to have 100 people type the word poll, and you only get one credit, no matter how many poll times 100 or poll cube. It just counts once. But that’s the number and then Brian will count those up. And let us know if we have reached it. And that’s for all of the polls. And we’ll send it to everybody. So we appreciate that. So, Steve, you made a comment before as soon as it pops up. I want to I want to say what you said, as you said, if there’s enough, yeah, so you said almost everybody is undergoing or about to undergo some type of change? And what do we see here? You know, the unsure without knowing who’s from a corporation who’s from a bank? It’s hard to tell, but it seems like every bank has at least something that that’s that’s underway. And any thoughts on these numbers? larger, larger percentage underway and smaller percentage within 24 months? Any any thoughts on that?

 

Steve Traut  13:34

Yeah, it definitely supports what we’re seeing in the industry. And, again, in talking with the treasury product folks, operations, there’s multiple products projects going on. So definitely changes in the air and m&a, you know, mergers and acquisitions. That’s that’s invoking change. And, you know, with systems and climate impact, and so those are some of the things that the sun might not be sure of what’s happening in the future with their, with their bank and the acquisition strategy. But you know, we saw some big ones last year, and I’m sure there’s more to come this year.

 

Craig Jeffery  14:24

Very good. Yeah. And so in the chat box, you’ll also see there’s a link to follow superior on LinkedIn, encourage you to go there, click follow. It costs you nothing makes us Steve happy makes me happy. It’s just a good way to stay connected with what’s going on. So thank you. Thank you so much. And just those who are counting. We were short 25 polls responses in the chat box. So you’re almost there. We’re almost there and see if you can do without me saying it again, about the word poll. So thank you for responding. So, you know, Steve, I’m just gonna frame this up. Because you know, you’ve, you’ve worked with lots of institutions. You know, when there’s change, there are pain points, right? There’s a lot of change. It can impact our user interface or feeds to back end systems, even the process, these make it difficult to converge on channels. I remember you telling me, I think you use the phrase, every time someone calls their bank or something this effect every time someone calls the helpline. There’s some kind of a negative experience on the customer part, something’s not working the way it should, and I need help. And, and that, that, that sort of is a sign for pain points, maybe you could talk us through

 

Steve Traut  15:45

Yeah, certainly. Yeah. You know, when the clients call in, either something’s changed, they have a question that it’s not, they can’t do the function they came to do on the online portal, you know, they need help, it maybe isn’t as intuitive as you might think. And you know, even moving the Login box on a website, could create an influx of calls to the customer service department. So yeah, all those things affect the user experience. And, you know, the pain points, you know, we had a top of 25 Bank, ask us, you know, what work in this project of sideways, you know, and the first thing out of our implementation, manager’s mouth was the data, make sure the data is clean. You know, you might have the correct CFO, you know, information, but all the users that use the products that log into the portal, we’ve heard that some users share credentials, you know, that’s a no, no, we all know that. And they do it, you know, if, if so and so, leaves the corporate office, and, you know, someone else takes over those duties, whatever that is on the product. And they’re just using the login credentials that their predecessor had. So you know, when you’re doing a conversion or migration, having good debt data and scrubbing that data, while you’re looking around road mapping out, you know, you’re you’re getting your vendors in line, your technology deck and all those resources, during that same time somebody should be going through and making sure the data is clean, that just makes for a more efficient conversion project. And, you know, the more efficient is, the less costly it is, because, you know, for what, in our experience, if you’re doing outreach, and you’re trying to find who the right users are, to train them, or migrate them, that’s just taken away from the time that they can be converted. So first and foremost, you know, do what you can on your, on your applications to, to clarify and confirm that your your users are your users. So that’s, that’s the number one thing that we, we stress. And next, you know, getting alignment across departments. You know, one of the first engagements that were involved with, the key takeaway from the product team was having those resources across departments, you know, an IT, customer service, product, other product managers, because you’re gonna need to lean on them, when things goes, you know, bump in the night, and they do, you know, you can’t plan for everything. And, you know, one of the key takeaways was have friends, make friends before you need them, you know, make sure that resources are aligned across departments. And, and one of the big ones, you know, get get your sales, your RMS involved, so they could communicate and support what change is coming. So that’s, that’s another point that you want to know. You know, and then, you know, pain points. Clients don’t always read their notifications. I think we all know that. You know, not everyone opens their mail or looks at their email, notification, say, you know, you have to get out in front of that and prepare clients for the conversion and you have their relationship manager Share, share that something’s coming up, you know, make sure that they know through the online banking, portal and messaging do what you can, you know, to, to prepare them from learning tools, education videos. So some type of plan to To let them know something’s come down the road. And then you know, pain points, you hear the Big Bang Theory, just flip the switch and let all the phones ring and all those clients struggle through it, that’s not best practice, best practice is to migrate in waves. So lobby for that if you can. And it’ll be a much smoother process.

 

Craig Jeffery  20:29

Some great pain points and even gave some pre alerts to how to, to avoid some of that. So that brings us that brings us to change management, right? Some of the pain points lead to how do we handle change what’s necessary? When we think about communication? You know, there’s example of, I need to communicate in different ways for different people. Like Steve said, you know, not everybody reads the emails, you know, you see it, I get an email every four days about some change coming, oh, it’s four weeks away. I don’t need to think about it, it’s noise. And then, and then all of a sudden, it’s like, Oh, something changed, and I didn’t listen to it. But the key parts about change management is what are you trying to communicate, communicate orally, regularly, in a clear manner, and usually through multiple channels or, or avenues, that are pathways that that allow the person to consume that in the best way. And so communication is a key element of change management, having a communication plan, training, especially when it involves a process, a new way of activities, having methods of people understanding what the change is, how it works, seeing, you know, screen activities, where do you go to log in, and depending on how complex it is, there might need to be some specific follow up. So make an online interactive, have follow up, make sure people are trained before the day occurs. So that there’s much less of a change when it comes to it comes to be functionally up and running. And then this idea of project management, this is how things get done. Project management means people are tracking the activities, communication training, if there’s waves, as Steve had mentioned, like waves of programs being run out, tracking to make sure it’s being done right. And if there’s any learning from the pilot group to the next group, but you’re making changes in training or communication or fixing something behind the scenes, that idea of project management is vital and essential. All right. Steve, that brings us to our second poll question. This, again, is a multiple choice question. We have quite a few options here. Which conversions are more difficult, so not easy, or not middle, but that they tend towards being more difficult. Select all that apply, some may be easy changes, some may be difficult. And we had needed seven pole responses. And we have it so we have enough poles. Everything else will just be extra word poles. So we don’t need anybody polling for now. And Brian, if you’d go ahead and pop up the social media link. So you can see CTM file which is strategic treasures, news, Treasury news file, go ahead and follow their or strategic treasure on LinkedIn. we’d love if you stay connected with us in that way as a way to extend today’s webinar discussion. And then when you get a chance, Brian pop up. Pop up Steve’s company as well. So conversion difficulty which conversions are difficult. So list all those that exist? Right. Steve, number one and number two, our lockbox and Portal changes, closely followed by data services. I definitely get the lockbox. I’m not as close to all the portal changes. But but that one, that one surprises me a bit. I mean, if we hadn’t had some of these conversations, I would have been shocked by how many portal changes are issues. But you gave me some hints about that when we’ve been talking to prep for this. Any comments on the big items or the secondary items here for conversion difficulty?

 

Steve Traut  24:43

Yeah, you know, the, the user experience is changing on a portal change, right. So so it’s gonna be new and, you know, think of somebody in receivables or payables. You know, they’re going online. They just want to do their job and get on to the next task and And when the portals changed, then, you know, that slows down the process and then can lead to questions. And so you know, those conversion efforts and having the different products plug into the portal and making sure templates are right, or credentials or limits and all those things, you know, the the devils in the details there and so I could see how that, you know, that’s that’s a major project at a bank with major impact to their clients.

 

Craig Jeffery  25:38

Cash vault and remote deposit capture are very, very physical events, right? There’s movement of cash, there’s pickups, there’s, there’s hardware, there’s a different toaster scanner, or maybe software for remote deposit capture. Those tend to be lower on this list is epic, is do you think that’s because less people use it? Or it’s just, it’s easier?

 

Steve Traut  26:00

Yeah, surprise, remote deposit capture, we’ve got a bunch of those conversions, you know, and when you have to uninstall and reinstall drivers, that that gets a little bit more technical. And that’s, you know, that requires walking customers through that process. Most of the time. I’ve been involved some with that, that is not required. And that makes it a lot easier. I can see that but changing RDC vendors, we you know, we’ve been previous, you know, previous to that experience, and there’s some work involved there. So, you know, that’s that’s, that’s surprising that that one is not considered as difficult as maybe data services.

 

Craig Jeffery  26:49

Yeah, so maybe we should have, if we had more complex polling, we could say who uses these services? And which ones are more difficult. That might? That’s more of a survey, I guess, than what we can do in the poll in a webinar. But yeah, thanks for your comments. Steve, everyone, thanks for responding to the poll, this has been very useful. Yeah, so this is a little bit more about what’s going on with the bank, what’s occurring? What do we need to be thinking about? Why is that? Why is that the case? We have, I’m just trying to try to think how I can describe this, it’s fairly, fairly busy slide. The whole point here is to say there are a lot of things that go that go on in the back, the bank back end, here, there’s changes, you might be moving parts of your systems to the cloud, or to a new DDA system, or platform, Ach, whatever it is, there’s a lot of things that are being added, changed or removed. And then there’s interfaces that may be delivered through partners or through the website, or through all kinds of different channels that the client consumes, whether it’s a browser, whether it’s their phone, it’s through some kind of secure FTP, it’s driven by API activities, all of those interfaces can result in changes to the back end to the back end, or to the direct client experience, as Steve talked about it. So this is not meant to be memorize this chart, other than to say, bankers know how complex their back end is. And that’s the part that’s below on the iceberg, there’s so many changes that they’re working on to get to fit into the process to make it clean, for a better experience. And a lot of the clients see this experience here where there’s the point of interaction, and interface. And so that’s the, that’s the part below, on the iceberg. And then, but then there’s then there’s the deep connections to the customer side. Now. I’ll start here on this, this image, if you look over on, you know, you’ve got the singular view, it’s bank to company, well, that’s really simple. But this whole bank, the company, that arrow is, really, if you blow that arrow out, there’s all kinds of issues here. That arrow is, hey, we’re passing information. We’re doing transactions, we’re processing, payments, activity receipts, disbursements, there’s returns or exception management. And there’s a range of areas in the company that use these banking services. They have needs questions, they have actions, they have their own process. So this whole deal of this concept of one to one of hey, the bank makes a change the company experiences is a vast over oversimplification, if you say that’s where the change management needs to occur, where the training needs to occur, because there is many to many relationship and the reality of many, many relationship between services, data, connections, processes, groups. And so this is where the complexity comes in, the more you’re embedded with your corporate client or your commercial client, the more points of complexity that exist here. There’s two different views on it.

 

Steve Traut  30:11

Yeah, Craig, let’s move to the next slide. I think that’s the one you’re talking to. Yeah. You know, that’s, that’s it, it’s in managing the user experience. And we’ve been involved where there’s been multiple URLs, and the conversion has been to a single sign on. And this illustrates, because single sign on, if he, you go in that direction, if you don’t have it today, you know, some, some users downstream might not have access to the online banking portal, all they got is the the tool, the RTC tool or whatever application, and we were involved with a conversion project, where, you know, we’re getting started and is like, hey, know, these users have access to the online, maybe they don’t have their hard tokens, they, you know, they need. So there’s a fulfillment effort that had to happen so that the conversion and the training of users could happen. And you know, the Be mindful of that, when there’s multiple users. And in talking about doing a client conversion, is it how many users per client, you know, per product? And so when you think about, hey, we got to migrate 2000 clients? Well, how many users? Does that mean? And what does that user experience look like? It’s not is it a one to one A, we’re just going to train the trainer at the client level? Or is every client represent five users? And then, you know, that expands your conversion effort, if you’ve got to do more training, and you have to touch more users. And that’s something to be really aware of, in talking about conversion is actually who are who are the users of the product? And if a client has multiple locations, how do you want to deal with that? If it’s if it’s one client, but they have 100? offices, and then they have 100, office managers that need to be trained on the application? So things that to consider when you’re planning a conversion, is really how many actual users need to be trained?

 

Craig Jeffery  32:27

Right, so are we ready to move on to the next poll? Question, Steve?

 

Steve Traut  32:33

Poll question are leading practices.

 

Craig Jeffery  32:36

Yeah. Are you seeing leading practices right now?

 

Steve Traut  32:38

I am. Yeah, you know, in discussing earlier, you know, best practices, what, what are things? You know, they seem logical. But, you know, one to remind all that, you know, even like I mentioned before, changing the login location on a web portal, can be disruptive. And so anytime you’re moving you know, the different functionalities, the products, where you access them, where you’re pulling reports, that affects downstream, it’s not as intuitive as you might think. The other, you know, we mentioned clean up the data, spend time doing that. It just makes for a more efficient process. And partnering with the right vendors, you know, do you have, do you have the tools, the staff in house? Or do you need to go outside and have somebody help pull data, build profiles, test application, you know, set setting up, you know, all those moving parts on the back end, affect how your clients experience is going to be, and I think we all agree, we’re doing this to retain the client, enhance the solution, and yet the plan, all for a great experience. So you don’t lose those clients. During the community. You know, the conversion, as we discussed, communicate early and often. through different means, you know, online banking, web messages, the message board, your RMS, your customer service team, letting them know that there are events coming up and look for the email communications and, and call to actions. There’s various, you know, sequence. I know in our solution, you know, when you sequence the email notifications with call to action, so that the client can move through the process. So that’s a leading practice terior clients who’s your who’s your top tier clients that you want the why glove service level, you know, look at your client base and divide that up as, okay, these clients, we definitely need to touch seven times eight times, we want a one on one experience, to walk them through the changes, and maybe, you know, go through a preview period on the new platform, get them familiar with the new platform before the actual cutover date, maybe the middle market clients, you’re gonna go with the more video tutorial, landing pages. And then you might have SMB, small, small business clients through self service, tutorial videos, and maybe a webinar for them to, you know, participate to learn. So these are, you know, that all stems from, you know, creating the client tears, and in a plan to move those clients through the migration process. Definitely a preview period for a new platform, if you could do it, you know, sometimes it is a hard cutover. And you don’t get a preview period, we always advise if you can work that into your migration or conversion project, stand that up that sandbox that preview. And if you can, you know, let clients go through and make sure templates are set up for users, admins, all those, all those type of things that need to be double check before you cut over to the actual go forward platform. Converting waves, it’s always best practice to do that. You always learn something, when you do a conversion. You start and you migrate a subset of clients, and then you pause, and then you know, make adjustments and then go forward and repeat. And you get better as you go on. There’s always a learning. And so we recommend a wave approach when you can.

 

Craig Jeffery  36:58

You know, you mentioned that you learn through the process. I think the other day you were you were also mentioning that this whole converting waves also prevents your core customer service teams from being overwhelmed. Change change is going to create a certain amount of even if everything goes perfect on your training and communication. There’s there’s more disruptions that take place.

 

Steve Traut  37:23

Yeah, the we’re trying to avoid an influx of phone calls in the customer service, right. I mean, that’s that you want to get out and ahead of the whole premise of this is get out in front of the change event. So it doesn’t overtax your your customer service department. And, you know, if you do it correctly, it’s business as usual. And that’s the goal.

 

Craig Jeffery  37:48

Excellent. So this is our third and final poll question. We have enough people to type the word poll for response, this is a double stack. Question for those who are highly capable. So if you look at the top one, it’s we don’t need more pull polls type. But the top one, is we measure for customer success during conversions, yes or no? Or I don’t know. And the second one is we’re staffed a resource properly for conversions. You know, that’s always interesting to me, because you know, are you staffed on the internal side and staffed on the external side? Lots of lots of elements there that are appropriate. If you’re a if you’re a corporation? I would say just click I don’t know, or, yeah, so you can register your response. We should have put one word from accompany. But yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how this takes place. Pull the webinar chat poll responses closed, nobody needs to type that again, Brian, if you go ahead and drop in Steve’s LinkedIn and my LinkedIn, both of us are happy to connect with you. If you just go and invite us to connect, we’ll make sure we connect. So that would be that’d be excellent to be able to continue our dialogue individually, or just stay current with each other. All right. There is a before the poll was done. Steve, there’s a question in the q&a box, it says and you can take it now or later, if you want. It says any suggestions for building out testing scripts, or collecting uncovering edge cases, edge cases to watch out for? That may be too long of a question to answer, but wanted to give you a shot at it that at least started.

 

Steve Traut  39:32

Yeah, yeah, that if you can, that is definitely a value add to make sure that the systems are set correctly. So you don’t doing the conversion wave and finding out you know, the connectivity isn’t all where it needs to be. So there are providers that do that service, and if you you know wanted to go out and have someone do that for you. I Mmm, it’s a good idea.

 

Craig Jeffery  40:01

Right, thanks. So the answers. measuring customer service, I’m gonna go with the yes and no, because I believe those would be the banks. It’s about as almost a seven to one. You know, sorry. 621621 response of yes to No. So it seems like people are measuring their customer success during conversions is that that number pretty much track with what you’re seeing? So maybe 8085 to 15 would be the would be the full bank response 85% measure that, that what you would estimate?

 

Steve Traut  40:46

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, definitely. And then we’re staffed or resource properly for conversions? Yes. 42%. Yeah, that’s good. If you can bring in the resources. And what we’re finding, especially post COVID, right. I mean, you can’t stress your current teams out in there’s, everyone’s got full time job. And when you do a conversion, that’s a whole lot more effort on those people. So bringing in the resources to support conversion is either through temp hires, or companies like ours, that can support it through a time period, right? For the heavy lifting. And it’s good to see that.

 

Craig Jeffery  41:30

Yeah, no. So if we extrapolate the staff resource, and I think that brings us up to about, it’s roughly like 4060 40%, do not see themselves staffed properly for conversions, which seems like that’d be pretty common. And then there’s a number that say, Hey, we’re always gonna be going through changes. We have an army of people in army, you know, a huge set of resources to help in that process. That this is quite interesting to me. So yeah, really, really useful. Thanks. Thanks, Steve, for your comments. Thanks, everybody, for answering the poll questions we had that closes the polls that we had. And that brings us to what needs to be managed. And I’ll, I’ll start this discussion off, Steve, I want you to come in as the subject matter expert here, I’ll just set it up. So this, the screen is set up where we have changes in requirements and scope. There’s a number of you know, we think about a platform change or interface change. There are a number of detailed items there. And then there’s also How broad is this change? If you do, you’re replacing an entire DDA system or your entire interface. That’s a different level of scope. And these all have downstream implications. So I guess, how do you look at it when you think about what needs to be managed? As you’ve helped companies do this?

 

Steve Traut  42:49

Certainly your vendor, you know, what, can they commit to whoever’s going to be hosting that the product suite or your online banking platform? You know, what, what’s their timeline? And can your internal IT departments support that? Are they on board? They committed to, you know, get the data extracted, and over into the new system? Do Is it a manual build, those are things that you know, need to be considered. And, and we come across, as you know, hey, you know, the timeline keeps changing, this happens, you know, we’re like, Hey, we’re gonna convert the first quarter of the new year, well, certain departments, either the vendor, or the bank isn’t ready. And so those dates get moved out, and then you’re trying to avoid the holidays, obviously. So you bump up against that. So it’s, it’s making sure you roadmap out and get buy in from all the departments and bring in the right resources, partners, whatever it takes to stay on, on target. And that’s something we see all the time as change of dates. And I think it’s just part of part of the process. As far as, you know, I was just like a sort of the other things here, need for information and expectations, you’re gonna have to get, you know, marketing involved, right, you know, to bless the communications. That’s always you know, they’re always doing their own thing and they have to, you know, you have to stop and say, like, we got this going on in the next few months. The communications what’s going to be posted on the web platform? You know, what, what notices via mail or email, all that has to be, you know, determined and you’re going to need to bring those resources in. And then determine is your conversion project. Do you want you know, the first thing I always ask is, Okay, how many users is not clients, how many touch points need to be converted? And what’s the timeframe? Do you want to do this over six months, three months, two months, whatever that is, and then we can determine how many resource, you know how many people, what kind of approach we’re going to take to accomplish the conversion. Because when you condense the timeline, and you need more people on it on a monthly basis, so So those are all things to think about when we’re approaching, you know, conversion project.

 

Craig Jeffery  45:34

So very good. So I have that, Steve, to share some examples, I think, to bring home some of these concepts. So there’s a few examples. And there’s also a couple of case studies, that I think whatever, whatever our role is, whether we’re a bank, or whether we’re, you know, we’re making changes inside a company, we have to think about these these impacts. And so, yeah, I’ll let you jump through the, this first example, Steve.

 

Steve Traut  46:00

Okay. So, you know, in talking in reference to an online banking conversion on the portal conversion going from, maybe it’s a homegrown solution to a cancellation by one of the major providers, you know, like, the cutover date, like I said, that seems, you know, that does move, there’ll be surprised at that, if there’s some fluidity there. But you’ll break it down by weights you, like I mentioned before, you do yourself a favor by categorizing your clients tearing them, and then converting in waves, you know, access and provision, that that’s something again, I forgot from multiple URLs to single sign on, make sure the users have access to it, whether it’s a hard token or soft token, you know, that they’re set up, and they could, you know, access the site, from a, you know, permission and credentials standpoint. So that, that so you know, don’t lose sight of that the training, you know, either through a one on one or, you know, a video tutorial, or webinar, you know, get out in front of it, you know, prepare your clients for the changes, so they can be efficient on the new platform and love it, you know, showing the enhancements, why, why the bank made this investment, big, big dollars, right, being invested in technology. And, you know, it’s all for the client. And if you don’t prepare the client, they’re not going to realize the benefits that, you know, they could possibly get out all the new technology, and the, you know, the GUI. So that’s, that’s a big piece of it is preparing them properly, problem resolution, you know, there are things that are going to need to be escalated. You know, so make sure that there’s a team available on the grantee, a tiger team that either, you know, your staff can go to, or an outside provider, like ourselves, that have a direct line to escalate, or, you know, get answers quickly. And so you can keep the process moving, and, and, you know, work with teammates to resolve, you know, problems. I did a project where the bank thought it was totally good to go, everything was set up. And as soon as we got started, they found out there was some levers on the back that got missed. And so, you know, you have to be able to pivot and, and allow for changes. And in this case, we were able to push out the scheduling application for two days to allow the user to book their appointment, but they couldn’t do it for two days, because that gave the bank time to set up the back end, who they knew who booked their appointment for their conversion. And we given that data, and then they were like, okay, great, we got 48 hours to make the last minute changes, so the conversion can happen. So those are things that get you know, you want to be cognizant of it. It’s clever. Yeah, yeah. It was like it was a last year like, we got started with the communications and everybody booked their appointments. And, and then it was like, well, we can we can make it to where they land. They can’t book it for two days. So So and then they provided reporting back to the bank twice a day, so they could do the setup, and be prepared to we can do our job and walk that customer through the conversion.

 

Craig Jeffery  49:42

Just in time conversion, huh?

 

Steve Traut  49:44

Yeah. Okay, scan System equipment changed. So in an RDC world. You know, make sure you’re looking at the hardware that’s out there and is it compatible? When I say hardware Check scanners that you know, is it compatible with the new environment? Do you want to sunset old equipment that’s no longer supported? You know, do you want from a tech support go forward? Do you want to get rid of some of the old some equipment that you don’t want to support? So those are all good things to think about when you’re doing an RDC conversion. You know, if your go to scanners or, you know, brand, x and y, and yet your your clients have all these other brands out there, you know, is this a good time to deploy new hardware, get everybody on, on one or two pieces of equipment, so that it’s less support effort by your tech support your tier one, tier two, onboarding all that it’s a good time, you know, to evaluate equipment. And, you know, one, one thing I learned this last year was, you know, we migrated some clients from a FIS platform to a Pfizer platform. And the scanners is a certain subset of scanners that don’t work without an ink cartridge on the new platform. It worked fine on the FIS platform when he went to the new platform, the scanners wouldn’t scan. So that was something that we weren’t aware of. And then, you know, so what did we do, we shut down ink cartridges at the last minute to get clients and put it in, so they could actually scan their checks. So there’s, there’s things that you learn. And you just pivot with that. But you know, the knowledge base increases, I just share that little tidbit. And if you’re interested in what scares is, you know, ping me and I’ll let you know, offline. Yeah, doing an RDC conversion, you know, does that involve know if that involves removal of an app to access the the legacy site for going to a new site? And does it require a driver, scanner driver uninstall and reinstall to make it work with the application? Because that’s, that could be technical for some, for some users?

 

Craig Jeffery  52:12

Should I be on example two Steve?

 

Steve Traut  52:14

Yep, you’re there. I’m looking at example two, okay, perfect. And so those are, those are some of the things and then you retirement of the old, the old system is, you know, when that data, no longer going to be accessible to the client, you might want to communicate that, as you cut over to the new system is, hey, we’ve migrated your data so that, you know, you can’t make deposits to that system, that’s, you know, to go forward, those are all things that need to be communicated to the, to the client. Stories from the front, so what could go wrong? Okay, yeah. Thinking, you know, what exceptions have been built into your legacy system that you have to think about, on your go forward system. So, you know, I think, when you look at your business and your client base and and say, hey, you know, this, this certain client subset, there’s a unique twist to the application, we have to, we have to build that in or, or we’re gonna have problems, those are the things that go bump in the night. So you have to make sure that system is, is tested, if you have that preview environment, it’s a great place to see if everything is functional in there that the client will need. And, you know, and avoid those those pain points. That’s, that’s really, you know, the takeaways, when I work with the various banks and their product teams, it’s expect things to go bump in the night, you know, don’t panic. Just work with your partners to to, you know, to migrate clients around that, and then get back to it. But be prepared to lean on others.  Your final thought?

 

Craig Jeffery  54:18

Right. Yeah. So, so final thoughts. What we’re looking at here is I’ll begin and then Steve, you can you can finish us out? As we look at what, what are some of the takeaways? How do we think about this? Versus leverage? That’s the lever? What what are some of the tools and levers that we can use in this if we’re a bank? Or if you’re a bank? What what do you need to do to help the client experience run smoothly and run? Well? You know, use automation for communicating digital communication. You can share it in different ways. Steve gave his examples of, you know, everything from emails to recordings or self service platforms where people can To help get themselves up to speed because it can be replicated on a one to many basis. And so leveraging those, the other is amplify your staff with third parties. Now, obviously, some some banks have adequate staff, because they’re planning for lots of conversions, lots of platform changes. A very significant minority don’t have that. Or maybe there’s certain situations where you need staff to amplify the activity because you have a crunched timeframe, or there’s higher touch related with some customers, or you need some other activity. So amplify what goes on, by supplementing with third party services. And then the other. The other part that I mean, that’d be the last thing I’d say on the leverage side, but the leading practices Steve talked about, I think you covered seven leading practices, and I know you have like a dozen or so that you cover, so is a nice, nice intro to these leading and best practices for handling conversions. I think the key thing is there can be too many to focus on and focusing on the top items, like you were emphasizing helps keep the primary item as the primary items, the items that are gonna have the most impact on your clients are really a key area of focus. The other the other piece too, and leading practices identify your gaps in the conversion if your bank, is it communication, is it getting in touch with all your customers? Is it having a way to roll things out at scale, to different phases? But the idea of where where are there gaps? And how can you close those is a key area to be thinking about?

 

Steve Traut  56:44

Yeah, I you know, you like you mentioned, leverage the the digital tools out there to provide reporting that we really haven’t even touch upon reporting and knowing when your conversion where you are and what stage of it, once it started, you know, make sure that you need the tools that you have are the providers that you pick, offer a good window into where you are at any time, you know, in what stage as the as the notification is going out to what what has bounced on the email communication so that you then you know, you’re going to have to employ an outbound call campaign since the emails, you know, bounced, we talked about data, right, getting the data cleaned up, that’s one of the main reasons is so when you’re sending communications out, those those bounce, you know what the bounce rate, the open rate, we can, you know, make sure there’s the methodology to measure all that so that you know, where you are in the process. As each week of the conversion goes by the you’re getting the real time reporting of, hey, yeah, we’re X percentage through the process as planned, or we’re falling behind, because the data, you know, we don’t know who the users are. And, you know, I feel like, you know, there’s tools out there, there’s providers out there like, like superior, that that have these things and could help with successful conversion project.

 

Craig Jeffery  58:23

So, yeah, excellent. Steve, thank you so much for sharing, sharing your thoughts, everybody. Thanks for listening, or participating through the chat box. We had enough poll responses. Hopefully you’re following Steve and me on LinkedIn. I’d love to connect with you there. Thanks so much. Brian has a few final announcements and everyone have a great day. So Brian?

 

Announcer  58:50

Indeed. Thank you, everyone for joining us today.  The CTP credits, today’s webinar slides, and a recording of today’s webinar will be sent to you within five business days. And for more on the latest treasury news and analysis, be sure to check out the Open Treasury Podcast as well as the Treasury Update Podcast by clicking the links in the chat box. Thank you, and we hope you have a good rest of the day.

 

Steve Traut  59:19

Thank you.

 

Craig Jeffery  59:20

Thank you.