Credit: Hubspot

Traditionally, the sales pipeline involves plenty of physical interactions in consolidating multiple parties’ communication. Ideally, a salesperson would allocate a majority of their resources, focusing on making the sales happen. However, each cycle stage is often cluttered with ad hoc tasks that end up being time-consuming for sales personnel.

As the world focused on perfecting its digital interaction after the pandemic broke out in early 2020, there are still obstacles that need to be overcome in eliminating mundane and repetitive tasks in a sales pipeline, especially in the financial industry where it’s tightly regulated and benefits from immediate customer engagement. It eats up the resources of a sales team as these tasks tend to be meticulous and can turn disastrous if not completed on time, such as losing engagement with prospects, off-the-mark market research, or miscommunication during pitching. If there is no consolidation effort being input into the pipeline, a sales cycle could easily turn into an array of overwhelming spreadsheets.

Managing leads: how prospective clients fell through the crack

The biggest concern for most organisations in a sales cycle is ‌in managing and growing the leads that come through their pipeline. As mentioned previously, the tedious admin processes can bring down morale. In achieving a sales goal in a cycle in the financial industry, the sales department can be pressured to attend to a client as soon as a lead comes in. This is due to the fierce competition in the industry. However, each client needs different personalisation in their interactions, and this is where the focus of sales personnel should be. Managing incoming leads with the sales team resources can be tricky, especially when the workload is delegated manually; this is where a sales team ends up losing out on their potential.

Previously excel spreadsheets were widely used to track a sales pipeline; from enquiries, customer data, lead follow-up, and sales engagement, as the method, is considered widely accessible to accommodate the structure of a sales cycle. But there is no real-time follow-up synchronisation in these excel spreadsheets, which can cause confusion. Where the financial industry is concerned, this could lead to disastrous outcomes if the processes are not streamlined and consolidated accordingly.

Automate your sales process 

Utilising sales force automation (SFA) software helps oversee the end-to-end process while allowing every party involved to be updated simultaneously in order to avoid any mishaps, especially in tightly regulated industries such as finance and banking Assignment of tasks also becomes smoother, besides freeing up sales personnel’s time from the mundane and repetitive tasks interfering with their focus to achieve sales objectives. Leads automation also plays an important role in minimising roadblocks in a sales cycle and helps foster smart sale forecasts, ensuring sales goals and projections can be achieved in a timely manner.

Sales force automation creates an intuitive journey for all sales personnel involved in the process. While this has always been a concern (dealing with roadblocks in an ongoing sales cycle), there have not been many efforts to streamline task assignments to the right person. Often, customers find themselves in a state of frustration by a lack of understanding from their financial and banking providers, which often led to a poorly managed escalation in the process. However, sales force automation is intuitive in the sense that it will assign the right sales personnel to ensure no leads are forgotten and increase the rate of engagement with customers. 

Besides that, sales force automation gives detailed insights into the crucial data needed in a sales pipeline. The knowledge gained from the compiled data then stays within the company as tracked by the system (eg: in the situation where an employee left). The sales team can now analyse past sales data, make a better sales conversion prediction, and upcoming opportunities and trends. This will allow for a major improvement in the overall customer relationship strategy and help the financial industry to further understand the ongoing and changing needs of their target audience, as proven by the disruption brought by the pandemic. An example would be in the case of a customer with a credit loan history with a bank; whereby this is a prime opportunity for the bank to offer new credit or financial products based on the insights gained from the customer’s history, allowing for cross-selling and up-selling strategies.

Automating the sales cycle for the future

With the world going digital in a big way since the disruption from the pandemic, implementing sales force automation should now be mandatory for any existing sales pipeline. Digitising the sales cycle frees up resources and allows sales personnel to focus on the important tasks at hand – securing customers and closing a sales cycle efficiently without losing time. 

However, despite that, there is still a slow SFA adoption in many businesses due to the lack of understanding of the system and its benefits. This could cost a business not only monetary resources but also labour and time. The benefits offered by SFA would definitely transform the way a business runs in an organisation, ultimately leading to higher revenue and a better customer retention rate.

Want to kickstart the utilisation of SFA in your sales pipeline, especially in the financial and banking industry? Reach out to us at contact@juristech.net to know more about Juris Leads and Juris Go; our sales force automation software along with its companion on-the-go mobile app.

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Digital transactions are now the norm in this current climate. In fact, most businesses out there place an emphasis on digitising most of their interactions with customers, which has been proven to increase the efficiency of an operation and enhance customer satisfaction. However, the industry is still plagued with cyber threat issues when it comes to digital onboarding; the primary choice for many institutions with customer engagement. 

Despite its many benefits, digital onboarding battles issues such as fraudulent document submissions, phishing, data breach, middle man attack, and many more. Although the public widely agrees that digital onboarding has enriched the interaction process with businesses, there has also been a global increase in security issues related to digital onboarding, costing an average of USD 5.72 million to the financial industry according to IBM and Ponemon Institution

Understanding the equal benefits and danger of digital onboarding

Cyber-attacks are no longer limited to high-level targets, in fact, the most common attacks are targeted at businesses relying heavily on network applications. According to Precursive, 82% of enterprise organisations rate their onboarding approach as a key driver of value. This reflects a significant jump of digital onboarding being deployed and used everywhere in 2021 alone. Unlike traditional manual application submission methods, digital onboarding has been touted as both efficient and threatening at the same time. Although many institutions now have a devoted team to this specific process, the financial industry is still seeing a worrying statistic of cyber threats.

Part of the contributing aspects is the lacking of fraud detection features by the deployed system. As we know, digital onboarding can be a lengthy process involving multiple stages such as data submission, decision-making, approval and can also includes the disbursement stage. .. However, the rapid growth of digitisation in recent years has pitched solution providers into a race to get their products as quick as they can to the market; often at the cost of the security of the system. 

Enter Juris Access: build with security in mind

Understanding that digital onboarding for the financial industry takes security seriously, the primary goal during the development of Juris Access is to ensure the efficiency of the process is not compromised by security issues. The back-end system of this software is built to ensure the best-embedded fraud detection features. 

A feature to be highlighted from Juris Access is the ability to learn the customer journey processes, mapping it back to any existing engagement history (such as utilised device or phone numbers). This minimises the threat of fraudulent data submission that might lead to stolen identity cases. Besides that, Juris Access is also tightly integrated to an institution’s existing system, allowing a straight-through-processing and direct engagement between customers and institutions. In return, it expedites the decision-making process and eliminates the threats of middle-man attacks. 

However, the majority of security concerns in a digital onboarding cycle is still tied back to the initial stage of customer verifications during application submission. A rise in complaints of inhospitable user interfaces due to the required security layers has deterred many institutions in effective customer acquisition and retention. 

This has also been a goal during the development of Juris Access; making sure the interface is friendly and simplified with no compromise to the security layers. The interface is designed to be intuitive to create a personalised effect. The intuitive feature is imperative to the back-end system, where it learns the pattern of customer’s engagement with an institution, simultaneously letting them detect any anomalies to quickly notify either the customer (via multiple omnichannel platforms) or the institution for immediate action.

Moving forward with the digitisation of the financial industry

As the world prepares itself for more technology revolution in the upcoming future, it poses a question: where do we start with matching the advancement of technology to provide a sense of security demanded by the public? 

The digital evolution of recent years had end-users demanding more security protocols to anticipate the rapid growth of technology in the financial industry. Whether we realise it or not, the cyber threats would also grow with the growth of cybersecurity. And this is what makes Juris Access unique. Despite all the security features mentioned, what Juris Access is, is ultimately offering the most efficient digital onboarding process that allows an institution to gain the highest level of trust with their customers. 

Interested to know more about Juris Access? Visit Juris Access or contact us at contact@juristech.net

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Online collaboration platforms have easily evolved rapidly in recent years. Managing documents at work should no longer be a tedious task, but one that has an organised process facilitated by the help of a well-thought-out system with little human input. This process not only reduces the labour workload but also adds value to a business’ target audience.

However, despite the growing document management technologies, one wonders if these platforms offer the best security to their organisation. Data is the new king; said many, and one small leak could potentially be disastrous to the business’s future.

Growing concern for data privacy

Although many organisations have made the switch to digital customer experience and applications, there are still a significant number of customers preferring physical manual forms. This creates a tricky accumulation act on the business’ part; ranging from consolidating the forms from various channels to managing the customer’s expectation with the processes.

Besides, with physical form, there is a minor issue in ensuring customer’s privacy is well protected during submission and form processing. The operation that stands behind the business also has to painstakingly review every form submitted to vet incomplete applications or instant disqualification from prospective customers. This, in return, leads to an ununified customer experience, eventually affecting a business operation. 

Enter Juris V-Box: the way to better document management and operation

As part of welcoming the digital revolution developing rapidly due to the pandemic last year, Juris V-Box is developed as a solution platform specifically geared to enhance the existing document management systems. Juris V-Box is an instant, secure document request and collaboration platform. As an all-in-one platform, Juris V-Box is highly secured, guaranteeing utmost data privacy for both the business and customers. Besides that, every submission is encrypted, ensuring data safety during collection and processing.  

As previously mentioned, complications usually arise when there are multiple channels for document submission, even with digital applications. This is where Juris V-Box with the solution; an omnichannel platform that merges document collection regardless of the submission channels. With user-friendly features, Juris V-Box prompt customers of the documents needed for their applications based on the products they choose. This is also proven to be useful when there are third parties representatives involved as it cuts back on requirement’s checking time, enabling fast sales closure and ensuring a higher customer retention rate.

Transforming business operations for more value-added services

Juris V-Box creates a unified experience for all users, with automated reminders for both businesses and customers. On the customer’s side, every submission follows with a URL link to access the system and for document check purposes. Any correction needed can be made on the spot. In return, the business operation would receive the application immediately for the decision-making process and response delivery in a short amount of time. 

Being mobile-responsive, Juris V-Box’s user-friendly system uses drag-and-drop uploads by utilising a device’s camera access to ease the process for customers. Businesses can now manage the applications and preview the documents immediately while improving their processing time and the level of customer response. Apart from that, Juris V-Box offers advanced search features and history logs so that a business operation can follow up with unresponsive or incomplete applications.  

Let’s take a loan application process as an example. Currently, there are many channels one can apply for a loan, varying from financial comparison sites like iMoney.my to the bank’s direct website. Each channel may provide a different document submission journey, which can be a hassle for both the customers and the financial institution. With Juris V-Box, the platform offers a simple collaboration platform that is highly secured and encrypted and helps banks collate all documents in one platform. Not only that, it offers multiple levels of authorisation for document preview to ensure secured access and minimal data breach.

With the world evolving digitally fast and shorter customer attention span, document management no longer takes the back seat in a sales cycle. It quickly becomes the engagement priority between the business and their customer, allowing businesses to not only survive but also streamline their operations to better future engagement. When it comes to data safety and a highly secured platform, Juris V-Box is surely the way to better document management.

Interested to know more about Juris V-Box? Reach out to us at contact@juristech.net

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The Left Brain, Right Brain Myth

It was previously believed that there are two types of thinkers: the analytical, left-brain type, and the creative, right-brain type. Of course, we should all know by now that this is a myth and both sides of our noggin play equally important roles in how we think. However, specialty in an industry is indeed real and sometimes one can get too specialised and rigid in a particular field, resulting in an inflexibility in problem-solving or an inability to think outside the normative paradigm.

As such, it is imperative for us to recognise that we can apply both analytical and creative thinking skills to solve problems as well as to generate new ideas. Just like how it can be useful to be methodical when it comes to designing creatively for a specific purpose, we can also apply creativity when it comes to solving a problem.

In this piece, we’re going to focus on the latter; specifically, design thinking and how we could use it for problem-solving especially when the problem itself isn’t yet clear. And to illustrate, we’ll be exploring an example of how we can stimulate home ownership growth here in Malaysia.

What’s the Opposite of Design?

Before we go any further, it is important to establish a clearer idea of what design thinking is, and the best way to help with that is to first identify the opposite of design. If design can be defined as emotional, indirect, and solution-focused, the opposite would be calculated, linear, and problem-focused – which are the traits of engineering. Often in engineering of any kind, be it civil, mechanical, or software, we are already presented with a clear problem to address or an objective to achieve, and it is a matter of solving our way there. Engineering is essential when we already have a clearly defined problem, however, there are times when even the issue itself is unclear.

It should be worth pointing out that opposites can be complementary. Coming up with the winning idea alone isn’t enough because once the problem has been identified through design thinking, analytical (engineering) thinking can step in and bring the idea to life. We will be focusing on the modern, five-stage model proposed by Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, also known as ‘d.school.’

Say, you’re a bank and you want to build a home ownership website. With enough software engineering prowess, you may end up with a slick website that lets you apply for a mortgage directly online. But that doesn’t necessarily address a core issue, which is the fact that house prices keep getting higher and many people could no longer afford the initial down payment. This is where design thinking comes in. Before even beginning to build the website or come up with a business model, you must first identify the problem itself – what is slowing down the rate of home ownership and how can the website help stimulate the growth?

Stage 1: Empathise (Learn from Other People)

Perhaps the most important of all, stage one is to empathise with the people experiencing the problem, which is easier said than done. Often, the one tasked with solving an issue may have a hubristic view of the situation, quick to come up with solutions that may only address the problem on a superficial level. Empathising involves engaging with the people affected, hearing them out, and learning about their experiences and motivations. Also important, is to be able to have an open mind during this stage and be aware of our inherent biases and preconceived notions. And finally, remember that feedback from the extreme end of the bell curve is the most insightful input – something that the mainstream group couldn’t provide.

All the information and pain points identified in this stage will be crucial during the next stage and during the development of the solution, as the solution will be based on the most accurate understanding of the target market.

To circle back to the low home ownership issue mentioned earlier, a hubristic approach would be to create a website that pools all available homes for sale around town, thinking that the problem is due to lack of home vacancy exposure. This is a good first step, but again, it only addresses a superficial issue. When you empathise with the people you’re targeting, the picture becomes clearer. When you start to focus at the ends of the bell curve, you’ll notice that folks with the lowest income in the group could no longer afford the high house prices, and those with the highest income often don’t have the time to be sourcing and submitting documents.

Stage 2: Define (Find Patterns in the Problem)

Once the data have been gathered, it is time to define the problem in stage two. All the observations and defined problems can only be progressed into a solution once we specify the core problems. As always, the definition has to be based on the user’s perspective and not yours, and it has to be on a personal level.

Even though having the sense of empathy is still important in this stage, what truly defines a successful stage two is the ability to have an informed intuition by finding patterns in pain points. This wouldn’t be possible without putting ourselves into the users’ shoes, and all of these would also be moot if we didn’t keep track of the data gathered.

Using the aforementioned example, a self-centred definition would be, ‘We want to increase the number of people getting mortgage from us by making it easier for them to view available homes and apply for a loan.’ However, by incorporating empathy we’ve discussed earlier, a better definition from the perspective of the user could go something like, ‘We need to make home-ownership more accessible by surfacing vacant and upcoming homes that are otherwise hard to find, lowering the barrier of entry in down payments, and making monthly instalments more flexible.’

Stage 3: Ideate (Generate Design Principles)

Stage three is when it’s time to ideate design principles and possible solutions. This is important because even if you’ve already found a good solution to design on, it pays to get as many alternatives as possible, based on different perspectives of the problem defined earlier.

It doesn’t matter which method you use for brainstorming, however, don’t just stick to one. At the end of the initial ideation phase with one brainstorming method, pick another method and go through the process again. You’d be surprised that a different brainstorming method might free our minds into looking at the issue with a fresh perspective, to find even better design principles. Above all else, never stray from empathising with the users and from the clearly defined issues determined earlier.

Back to our example. At first, the brainstormed solution you could come up with may only be focused on the perspective of the lower income bracket. This design principle involves lowering the down payment or stretching the tenure so that the monthly instalments are lower. But doing so alienates the folks on the other end of the spectrum. Remember, those in the upper income bracket may care more for a seamless home application and approval process – one that doesn’t involve having to physically visit the bank and the housing project’s office several times to submit paper documents. Your new design principle should also incorporate a seamless application process, which would also benefit the other income brackets. There might be practical limitations to make ideas tangible; lowering the down payment may not be possible, in which case you would have to completely ideate from another perspective. Instead trying to sell a home outright, first allow leasing/renting of the property, and make available the option to purchase that very house at some point later, with the total rent paid so far offsetting the house price – a transaction also known as rental-purchase or rent-to-own.

Stage 4: Prototype (Make Ideas Tangible)

Prototype is stage four and it’s usually where the fun happens, when the ideas are brought to life. Do not worry if there are a lot of design principles generated earlier to be turned into specifics; that’s the whole point of prototyping. It is a process of making those ideas tangible in an agile and low-cost scenario. Because of the inherent biases that we may have, it is also imperative that the prototypes should be shared with people from outside of the design team or even with outside focus groups to poke holes in the prototypes.

Remember that the purpose of this stage is to test the viability of the concepts generated earlier, and the aim is to single out the best possible solution out of the many. Every single prototype should be examined to see if it is accepted, needs improvement, or is just downright rejected, based on the different user experiences and perspectives. By the time you’ve singled out the best solution, you would’ve already gained a clear understanding of the solution, it’s inherent limitations, and new challenges unforeseen earlier. More importantly, you would also get a perspective on how end users are motivated, how they would use the solution, and how they would think and feel while using it.

Let’s say your winning ideas for stimulating home ownership have been established and modelled. One of the prototype that you came out with may involve having a straight-through home application process, from picking a home to getting a mortgage, all in one website. But based on the problem definition you’ve determined in stage two, and ideas you had in stage three, that prototype only addressed one of the issues. To truly lower the barrier of entry and offer flexible payments, your website needs to show vacant and upcoming homes, allow renting first and buying later, and have a straight-through application process without the need to visit any physical banks (at least not initially).

Stage 5: Test (Iterate Versions Rigorously)

The test in stage five is not to be confused with similar tests done in the previous prototyping stage. At this point you’ve already distilled to a few, if not a single best solution to solve the issues defined. The prototype is still far from perfect, so here we’re utilising the focus groups or evaluators earlier to rigorously kick the tyres, for you could iterate the solution until a final form takes shape.

Even though this is the fifth stage, more often than not it is not the last and the test results obtained in this stage can and should be used to revisit the earlier stages which we’ll talk about in the next chapter.

Your home ownership website is beginning to take shape. During the testing, some of the challenges not previously seen are beginning to surface. Because rent-to-own will push monthly instalments higher, even with a lower barrier to entry, there may be a group in your target market that still prefers the good ol’ down payment and mortgage route, and your current version of the website is excluding them. Knowing this additional information could help you to empathise with that group and update the problem definition – it is not just lower barrier to entry and ease of application, but also lower monthly instalments if possible, though that may prolong the loan tenure.

A Non-linear Approach

It is worth emphasising that, while we ran through the stages in a linear fashion, design thinking shouldn’t be constrained in that flow. In reality, design thinking is best approached in a non-linear way. The different stages can be conducted in parallel, the results of which can be used to inform one another.

Even if we were to initially look at design thinking linearly, the results of each stage can determine how far back we will need to return. Test findings may determine that a better prototype is needed, or that the idea needs to be scrapped for a whole new one. Sometimes, prototypes we have couldn’t obtain what we set out to achieve, because we didn’t clearly define the problem to begin with, or that we didn’t empathise enough with the target audience to find out what they really want or need. Understand that going back to earlier stages isn’t a fault of your or your team’s making – reiteration in design thinking is a feature by design. We’ve seen how projects get pushed through to the end, only to fail, because of the sunk cost and how the team is unwilling to take a few steps back to re-evaluate the problem definition and pivot when necessary.

After testing your prototype home ownership website, you could choose to go back to prototyping to include a path on the website to directly apply for a home mortgage and add an option to stretch the loan tenure longer to lower monthly instalments.

Empathy, Data, and Attention to Detail are Key

A company looking to innovate or to solve unclear problems will have to mobilise the whole organisation to think like a designer, and design thinking is a way to codify the process into a template that can be replicated. While thinking out-of-the-box can be difficult due to self-imposed constraints and mindsets, the codification of design thinking allows for those not trained as designers to think like one, and to use creative tools to problem-solve a vast range of unclear challenges.

All these are easier said than done, and to truly master design thinking, we believe that empathy, data, and meticulousness are key. Data, while advocacy of its importance is already a cliché at this point, still is the best tool we have to find patterns that confirm or deny our earlier intuition. William Edwards Deming, an engineer and statistician, once said, ‘Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.’ However, without empathy, we can flip the quote around and say that, ‘Without insight, you’re just another person with data.’

To wrap up our example of the home ownership stimulus project, if you’ve approached the project with a more self-centred view, we might still end up with a decent property aggregator website with links to mortgage services. However, to truly address your market’s need, you’ll need to think like a designer, and sometimes the best possible solution may involve shifting the paradigm to an entirely new concept like rent-to-own. It is not easy, but nobody said it was.

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2. Dam, Rikke; Teo, Yu Siang. 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process. Interaction Design Foundation, 2018-03-29.
3. Fuller, R. B. Humanity’s Critical Path: From Weaponry to Livingry (PDF). Proteus, 1983-05-01. Retrieved 2016-09-15.
4. Rent-A-Center, Inc. History. Retrieved 2018-04-25.
5. Rittel, Horst; Webber, Melvin. Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (PDF). Policy Sciences 4.2, 1973, p155-169.
6. Simon, Herbert. The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969.
7. McKim, Robert. Experiences in Visual Thinking. Brooks/Cole Publishing Co., 1973.

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