They say that if you want to get your project funded, tell your boss it will make money.

The next best way to get your project funded is to tell your boss it will save money.

But if you’d like to get your project killed, just pitch it to your boss as an “improvement to the customer experience.”

For all of the talk these days about customer experience, why is it so hard to get companies to pay attention to it? Think about the experience with Remote Deposit Capture (RDC). The majority of banks still have their multiple RDC channels siloed, so that they don’t talk to each other. Consider the experience of a small business, which makes up the primary customer base for RDC. A small businesses staff can and often do make multiple deposits to the company account in a single day, and those deposits can come from the storefront, at an ATM, from a home office, or in the field via a mobile phone. Meanwhile, the experience at each of those channels can be different from one to another. It takes each employee a different amount of time to do the deposit, they input different data into different screens, they see different results, and they receive different forms of confirmation – physical receipts, online statements, or SMS receipts. Too confusing!

At NCR, we like to talk about customer experience in the context of flower companies. What can I say? We’re romantics. But think about the multichannel experience of a flower company. I get a text message to my mobile phone reminding me of my wedding anniversary. I can order flowers for my spouse on the phone. Check the status of my order online and then brag that I remembered my anniversary using connections to social media, such as Facebook. And, by the way, I can complete many of those same portions of the transaction through redundancies in the other channels, too, and the experience is largely the same no matter where I go.

A small business uses RDC for their cash flow – their lifeblood. If a flower company can have that level of multichannel integration and customer experience, why can’t a bank do so for remote deposit capture? Certainly check clearance is much more mission critical than a rose bouquet!

On second thought, remembering my last anniversary, that may be a bad example…

Thankfully, an enterprise wide RDC option exists, which creates a better, more streamlined customer experience. At NCR, we’ve seen more and more financial institutions turn to our APTRA Passport solution. Not everyone ignores customer experience. For instance, one bank we’ve worked with faced increasingly stiff competition, and, despite the economic pressures to focus on operational efficiencies, their key objective in rolling out RDC was to differentiate themselves as a mechanism to protect their customer base and attract new customers. They deployed the APTRA Passport solution, with an initial focus on the Commercial channel. APTRA Passport is an enterprise multi channel hub that delivers numerous, alternative ways to make deposits and interact with the bank – at the ATM, at the branch, online, at corporate or small business locations, and via mobile. The deployment provided improved cash management and instant reconciliation capabilities that led to an increased share of their customers’ wallets while delivering service consistency. The results were a significant growth of clients and revenue and they established themselves as a premier provider of sophisticated customer services. And the integrated and scalable APTRA Passport hub gives the bank the ability to invest tactically channel by channel while building out an enterprise solution.

Improving the RDC customer experience is just too easy to ignore any longer.