8JUNE 2022By David Versteeg, Chief Digital Officer, Van Lanschot KempenA FINE BALANCE: HUMAN, DIGITAL AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEENWithin the world of banking, there's a continuum between the fully offline way of doing business of the past, and the fully digital experience that we see in some retail banks. But for wealth managers like Van Lanschot Kempen, it's always been about finding a balance between the two. And that's what we call omni-channel service: digital tools should enhance the client-banker relationship, not replace it. But what do we mean by that? Omni-channel is about striving for the perfect marriage between human interaction and digital channels (which may or may not also involve a human being) to create a seamless user experience. From a client perspective, that means opening an app on your mobile phone to check the value of your portfolio, video chatting with your banker to ask questions, logging in on your laptop to look at transactions, meeting your banker face-to-face for some personal interaction (Covid rules permitting!) and everything in between. The challenge is to make all these different interactions coherent for the client ­ so that if they've had one conversation via the chat function in the app, they don't have to repeat themselves when they call customer service a few days later. This may sound simple, but it has a huge impact on the design and development of your channels. The point of omni-channel service is (perhaps rather obviously) that the client chooses the channel they prefer at that moment in time. So from a design perspective, you need to ensure that the banker is only one click away.The flip-side of offering a seamless user experience is that you also need to make sure convenience and security work in harmony. So while on the one hand, you want to David VersteegOPINIONIN MY
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