How Banks Can Derive Business Intelligence from Video Content Analytics

Improving Bank Customer Service and Sales

Much like retail enterprises, banking is a competitive industry in which customer service is of paramount importance. Therefore, while banking professionals are concerned with the physical security of their employees, buildings, and monetary assets, they also prioritize the success of every branch of their multi-site organizations.  One of the ways banks bolster success is by offering various services – from loans and credit cards to checking and savings accounts – to their customers. Customers carefully choose their bank and give their brand loyalty to banks that cater to their unique needs. Banks are ultimately sales-driven organizations, and customer acquisition and retention are key to their long-term success. So how can banks improve customer service and sales? They can leverage video content analytics to derive business intelligence to benefit their entire enterprise organization.

New Data from Existing Resources

Before a bank can start gathering business intelligence, they must first evaluate what attracts and retains customers. Most people choose their bank vendor based on factors beyond checking and savings rates. They will consider if a branch is easy to access, if it’s typically congested, if there are long lines for the bank tellers or ATM machines, and even a branch’s overall cleanliness. To meet customer expectations, banks need actionable data for intelligent decision–making. While this kind of data has not always been easy to come by, banks can now extract and leverage data by enhancing systems already in place. For instance, most banks have deployed video surveillance systems for security reasons, but by integrating video content analytics software, video surveillance can also become a tool to improve sales and customer service. Deploying video content analytics (VCA) technology – video analytics for short –enables operators to aggregate and analyze video content over time, index the metadata, and harness the visualized video intelligence to track trends and drive informed decision-making.

Here’s how intelligence from video content analytics can help banks address their two main objectives of 1) optimizing traffic flows and 2) preventing transaction abandonment.

1. Data-Driven Traffic Optimization 

It is imperative for bank managers to understand how people interact with staff and navigate the space to provide them with the best experience possible.

By understanding peak customer and vehicle traffic times, banks can better meet customer expectations by intelligently scheduling staff to support peaks while not overstaffing slower hours.

A bank can also understand where and why crowding occurs by leveraging video heatmaps that quantify dwell time (how long and where people stand in an area). The heatmap could indicate that queues are resulting from slow service or that there simply aren’t enough tellers during peak hours to serve all the visitors. Heatmaps can also show how entry and exit patterns are causing crowding in other areas of the bank, parking lot, or drive-thru teller queues.

Similarly, management can track how many people visit an information or service kiosk and even observe demographic data points, such as the percentage of women versus men visiting a kiosk, to further personalize customer experiences.

Video analytics can also track these all of these trends over time, so bank branches can understand annual, monthly, weekly, daily or even hourly patterns. With this business intelligence, they can proactively manage and optimize each location by first detecting and preventing inefficiencies with real-time alerts, also generated by the video analytics system.

2. Transaction Abandonment Prevention

To address transaction abandonment, bank managers must understand why consumers don’t engage in or complete transactions. Is the loan information kiosk located in an ideal place? Are the offices not visible or welcoming enough? Is there a lack of staff to complete transactions? Although traffic is not always related to transactions (i.e., signing up for a credit card or loan), an improvement in traffic flow can affect transactions. After all, a customer is more likely to complete a transaction or sign up for a service if there are not long wait times for customer service.

Understanding typical behaviors can also help banks strategize and prepare for anomalous activity. While video content analytics can provide the business intelligence needed to prepare optimal customer service strategies, video intelligence software can also deliver real-time intelligence and alerts that notify managers when anomalies are detected. Count-based alerts, for instance, can be triggered when a certain number of people are detected in a pre-defined area within a specified period of time. These alerts can be configured based on business intelligence from typical bank traffic and empower operators to assess and drive responses in the moment. When more people than expected are dwelling – whether the dwelling is the result of long queues or a developing emergency situation – a video-based alert can enhance situational awareness for the bank and drive swift response.

Optimizing Business Intelligence with Data Fusion

Many banks use more than one data-driven system, and video intelligence can be integrated with data from other sources, enabling analysis and cross-referencing of comprehensive data insights. This practice, called Data Fusion, enables banks to correlate their video data about the flow of traffic with transaction records. Managers can thereby understand what percentage of in-branch transactions are abandoned and the potential causes, such as untimely customer service. Based on this actionable data, the bank can make decisions to prevent future abandonment and address other uncovered issues.

Aggregating Data Across Branches

While video analytics data certainly benefits individual branches, evaluating the aggregate bank data across all branches enables the corporate management of large financial institutions to improve performance, operations, and security – locally, nationally, and internationally. Video data helps managers spot trends across a banking organization, from marketing to operations and security, empowering them to make decisions based on quantified data. For major banking institutions, this business intelligence can optimize personnel, time and resource investments, and considerably improve customer service to drive revenue and retention.

The Data-Driven Bank

As we know from industries like retail, modern banking organizations must leverage video analytics technology to stay agile and competitive in today’s market. Traditionally, banks have relied on gut instinct and human observation to address problems like traffic optimization and transaction abandonment, but such observations are prone to bias or human error and yield inaccurate data. Fortunately, video content analysis technology empowers banks managers to make better decisions – for individual branches and the organization as a whole — by deriving business intelligence from digital video data.

Our 2024 M1 release can deliver the critical intelligence you need from all of your bank branches to one, centralized hub.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in September 2019, and has been refreshed and updated for accuracy.