Keynote: Guangdong Postal Branch proactively adapts to the trend of internet scientific and technological innovation, explores the path to intelligent outlets with postal characteristics, and builds a smart banking outlets platform for proxy financial services to provide better customer experience.

As internet finance is rapidly merging into people's daily life, comfort, convenience and speed have become the most basic requirements for financial services. Customer identification, business process, service layout and marketing models of the traditional physical outlets have become difficult to meet the requirements of the overall transformation of the outlets. So, there is an urgent need for a strong and powerful management platform to improve the comprehensive service capabilities and targeted marketing capabilities of the outlets.

Guangdong Postal Branch proactively adapts to the trend of internet scientific and technological innovation and explores the path of intelligent transformation against the background of the Internet. In 2015, it independently developed a form-free system, with which nine commonly used forms in counter services became paperless, and extended the practice to the forms of insurance service. Based on this system, Guangdong Postal Branch continued to focus on customers’ needs and explore the optimization of the customer service process and the counter service operation process in proxy financial outlets. After two years of practice, Guangdong Postal Branch constructed the smart banking outlets platform for proxy financial services from the aspects of remote appointment, customer identification, process optimization, and targeted marketing, and gradually rolled it out in the proxy financial outlets across the province. It can be put that the construction of smart banking outlets platform of proxy financial services is a typical form of intelligent outlets construction with postal characteristics in Guangdong.

The smart banking outlets platform integrated WeChat, queuing machines, counter service terminals with customer marketing management system at a comparatively low cost, realized the functions like WeChat appointment, form-free services, paperless customer identification, coordinated customer information query and VIP visit reminder. Thus, it succeeded in forming a closed-loop process of customer service in the outlets, making the clerks’ operation more personalized and offering customers better experience.

With WeChat channel interconnected, customers can locate the nearby outlets though a WeChat public account, check the queuing situation in real time and make an appointment for a queuing number online before they go to the outlets. The platform will automatically predicate customers’ ranks and provide different queuing numbers accordingly. When a VIP customer or a customer with appointment picks up the queuing number at the outlets, the platform automatically forwards the information to the manager on duty of the outlets and assists the staff members in carrying out targeted marketing in the lobby. Through this WeChat account, customers can also learn about the business scope, geographic location, navigation, forms pre-filling, business hours, product marketing and other information of the nearby outlets.

With the queuing machine channel interconnected to the customer marketing management system, customers can pick up their queuing number by entering their reserved phone number, swiping their ID card or bank card on the machine when arriving at the outlets. Then the customers’ basic information and ranks can be quickly identified, and promptly notified to the manager on duty of the outlets.

With the counter channel interconnected, when customers conduct transactions at the counter, clerks can fulfill such tasks through the counter terminal system as exempting customers of individual savings services or insurance services from filling out the forms, executing paperless customer identification, calling queuing numbers, displaying customers’ information automatically. In this way, the business process is streamlined, and efficiency improved.

With the construction of the smart banking outlets platform, Guangdong Postal Branch reengineered its customer service process of the outlets at a low cost, and achieved good results. Firstly, the old equipment in the outlets got updated. The systems of different channels became interconnected, and customer experience being enhanced. Secondly, for the first time, the postal proxy financial services in China achieved paperless customer identification. On this platform, the paper customer ID card copies and the citizen ID online verification results are turned into images. In coordination with centralized authorization center and internal audit center, the outlets can fulfill paperless customer identification through the whole process. Thirdly, cost reduction and efficiency improvement have been achieved through the introduction of the platform. With the platform, the workload of the clerks has been lightened, the operation procedures reduced, and the waste of paper forms cut. As a result, it has saved a lot of costs for the enterprise.