With many banks and financial institutions closing their physical doors and reducing staff levels to save costs, ATMs are becoming a vital part of the way customers transact. Even with the global shift to mobile and online banking, and predictions of an eventually cashless society, ATMs are still seen as an essential service. The convenience of an ATM allows consumers to perform quick self service transactions like depositing and withdrawing cash, bill payment and transfers between accounts.
However, with massive advances in software and hardware, an ATM is not just for depositing and withdrawing. Today's ATMs are more complex and multi-dimensional. Often, they use software and hardware from various vendors and communicate with different services, and more than one network, providing a broader range of transactions.
In financial terms, an ATM is one of the most important touch points in the customer experience journey. When the system is inaccessible, or the ATM is unavailable due to cash depletion, customers are forced to go to another location. This creates customer dissatisfaction and frustration, which inevitably leads to loss of revenue.
An ATM today is more resilient in design, architecture and servicing requirements, but with complexity of design, comes the increased likelihood of problems. Once, availability status was the only metric to be considered in ATM management and monitoring. Now that an ATM is more technologically advanced, 'unavailability' becomes far more broadly defined than the machine running out of cash, or being updated. Problems are more likely to to extend to a particular service, ATM network communications system, or card bin range rather than the machine itself. This highlights the need for real time ATM monitoring and transaction analytics so that managers and operations teams can gain deep and detailed insights into failure issues.
The problem of failed customer transactions has forced banks to drill deeper, and look at ATM performance from a customer perspective.
Real time ATM monitoring and transaction analytics allows managers and tech teams to look deeper into network availability issues, security and failed customer interactions. It provides answers to why incidents are happening, analyzes frequency of incidents, creates alert and resolves issues more quickly. And most importantly, ATM monitoring and management tools reveal predictive solutions to prevent these problems in the future.
Another feature of real time ATM management software is that it enhances ATM security and helps build an invaluable base of customer experience and interaction data. This plays a vital role in developing successful customer service strategies.
Once, ATM monitoring solutions typically revealed only basic information about the ATM mechanical sensors, for example the total cash available, ATM network accessibility, cash or paper jams. To see the benefits of today's ATM management and transaction monitoring solutions, financial institutions need to review their legacy solutions. This will give a clear picture of their systems, what benefits are being delivered, and what needs replacing.
Real time ATM monitoring and analysis reveals complete end to end visibility into ATM systems health status, cash and consumable levels. With defined rules in place, ATM monitoring will generate alerts, warnings and data analysis for proactive incident management. Some of the main benefits include:
At any given moment an ATM fleet can enable up to thousands of customer interactions. By analyzing these interactions, banks can mine powerful data to optimize ATM activity and performance in real time.
Poor system performance can impact your services, and ultimately your bottom line, and this is certainly true without the proper ATM monitoring and ATM performance management tools in place.
IR's Transact suite of payments solutions can help provide deep insight into your entire ATM network. This allows you to spot patterns and proactively avoid problems that can impact your bottom line. Downtime leads to lost transaction fees and dissatisfied customers. IR's Transact captures data and turns it into valuable insight to optimize end to end operational efficiency
Scale is probably the biggest challenge that banks face when monitoring payments in a high volume environment. A typical bank has a large number of payment applications and transactional gateways. Payments can come from ATM transactions, store purchases, or direct deposits for payroll. IR's transact gives you the ability to see that your payment network is flowing smoothly. A single dashboard can monitor and give complete visibility into the different payments flowing through each application in your transaction environment. This assures banks that the whole payment system is working effectively and most importantly, that customers are getting the service they expect.
Contact us today to find out more about our ATM monitoring solutions.