‘Checking’ It Twice: 4 Remote Sites Banks Should Be Monitoring This Holiday Season

The holiday season is right around the corner—and consumer trends continue to show that spending during holiday shopping periods is higher than at any other time of year. With this increased spending comes the heightened need for reliable banking services. From credit card and debit card authorizations to deposits and essential withdrawals, customers need to be able to trust their banks to carry out transactions and protect their account information. Consistent network and application performance is critical to banks, especially in an industry where competition is fierce, and reputation impacts customer loyalty.

Digital transformation and mobile banking have revolutionized the financial services industry, making high-quality digital customer experience a top priority for maintaining customer satisfaction and retaining business. Customer service plays a pivotal role in addressing issues when they arise and assisting customers in a timely fashion. With banks having such complex infrastructures, IT teams need end-through-end observability into not only data centers and the cloud but also the dispersed remote sites that make banks convenient and accessible to all.

Four Remote Sites That Benefit from Comprehensive Observability

To troubleshoot efficiently and avoid negatively impacting customers and employees, leading banks benefit from end-through-end visibility at these remote sites:

1. Contact centers: Real-time monitoring of voice and video technologies is needed to assure high-quality digital experiences for customers. Lagging connections, dropped calls, and muffled audio when customers are seeking help from a contact center agent on a time-sensitive issue with their finances can be frustrating and time-consuming, quickly resulting in lost business. Deep packet inspection (DPI) provides valuable insight into network issues that impact voice and video services, including error information, quality-of-service (QoS) class assignments, and quality measurements such as mean opinion score (MOS). Synthetic testing capabilities also enable IT teams to assess quality before customers are connected to contact center agents to ensure that interactions are smooth and customer satisfaction is high no matter where in the world contact center agents are working from.
2. ATMs: With consumers always on the go, especially during the holiday season, easy access to their bank accounts is critical—whether from their cars or inside bank vestibules using ATMs. Remote observability at ATM locations helps assure availability for swift withdrawals, deposits, and transfers from wherever customers choose to access their funds. Efficient user experiences prevent lengthy lines of disgruntled shoppers from forming at the ATM. Resetting, rebooting, and repairing ATMs can immensely hinder convenience, not to mention IT staff productivity when on-site support is necessary.
3. Branch banks: Today’s largest banks have branches located all across the globe offering a wide range of services to their customers. Whether they are opening or managing accounts, withdrawing or depositing cash, or seeking financial advice or notary services, branch banking offers customers a human connection that many people prefer when handling their finances. Physical branch bank locations often require video streaming for security purposes, as well as reliable Wi-Fi for customers to download the bank’s mobile application. Remote observability provides IT teams with a view into network and application performance at these branch banks even when they are not physically present to ensure these services are performing. This packet-level visibility helps maintain employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
4. Third-party vendors: Banks rely on third-party vendors for technology enhancements and improved customer experiences—but those third parties also present myriad risks. Whether their technology is used for credit card processing, overdraft protection, mortgage lending, or brokerage services, observability of its performance helps IT teams determine the accountability of network and application performance issues. This eliminates finger-pointing and the “blame game,” improving troubleshooting time and reducing mean time to repair (MTTR).

NETSCOUT Remote Site Observability for Banks

By continuously monitoring network and application performance at remote sites via DPI at scale, IT teams at banks can dramatically reduce MTTR when degradations do occur—or even prevent them before they impact customers and employees. Early-warning capabilities, packet-based information, and proactive synthetic testing to monitor both performance and user experience help mitigate the risk of performance disruptions and maintain business resiliency.

With the holiday season rapidly approaching, leading banks would benefit from assessing their current environment and engaging in capacity planning to account for increased traffic and protect essential banking services. Without comprehensive observability at each business edge—from data centers to the cloud to remote sites and beyond—not only do banks face higher IT support costs to send staff to affected locations but they also risk performance disruptions snowballing into outages that can result in customer attrition and damage the bank’s reputation for the foreseeable future.

Register for our upcoming webinar “Observability for Reliable Performance in the Banking Industry.”  Also, learn more about how NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions increase remote-site observability to slash troubleshooting time for this bank.