Your bank is making a significant investment in its core technology, so it only makes sense to do a progress check routinely to ensure the financial juice is worth the squeeze. Summer is the perfect time to conduct a review and ask yourself questions like what's working? What isn't? What needs to change in the next half of the year?
To help with your review, we’ve provided a few questions below for you to start identifying the areas in need of improvement and make recommendations to resolve any known issues. Even if you believe your technology and the relationship with your provider are doing great, there may be opportunities for optimizing your system’s performance and elevating your customers’ experience.
How to Conduct a Core Review
First, divide your report into sections such as technology, service, support, and delivery. From there, jot down comments, issues, or questions in each section.
Here are some questions to start getting your thoughts on paper. Feel free to copy and paste these questions into your report as needed and add your own notes.
Technology
- How has your technology been operating this year?
- Do you believe your bank has the right products and services to be successful this year? If not, what do you think is missing?
- With your current system, have you experienced any downtime or technical disruptions? If so, how long did it take to get back online?
Service
- Overall, how would you rate your core provider's service?
- Did your core provider have any software enhancements or updates to your core system this year that you did not request? If so, were you notified appropriately prior to their delivery?
- Were there any changes to your contract this year? If so, were you notified of these changes ahead of time?
Support
- How would you rate your core provider’s support team when it comes to troubleshooting and resolving issues?
- How would you rate your core provider’s support team when it comes to training?
- How would you rate your core provider’s support team when it comes to alerting you on outages or security threats?
Delivery
- If your bank added a product or third-party integration, was your bank satisfied with the delivery process?
- Does you core provider ask for feedback? If so, how?
- Does you core seek your bank's input in the product enhancement process?
A Few More Tips
- Simplify the review. Unless it’s been a few years since you performed a review or you’re seriously considering switching core providers, your review can be short and simple to bring outstanding issues and concerns to the surface, or just keep a running wish list.
- Customize your review to fit your needs. If the structure above doesn't work for your business, don't use it. Perhaps, it's easier to review each product and service you have with your provider and address what's going well and what needs improvement.
- Involve your staff. Your team are the "boots on the ground" working directly with the technology. Ask them for their input and any recommendations to improve operations and/or the customer experience.
- Create an action plan. You may have some ideas and feedback, but they won't come to life unless you create a plan with action items. What's next? Who do you call? Do you need to delegate any activities? Are any of these actions timebound? Consider mapping out the "to-do" followed by the actions to take for resolution.
- Schedule future checkups. If the timeline works for your business, you should plan on conducting a review or checkup every 6 months. If there aren't many changes to your technology and your team is pretty satisfied with its performance, then 12 months may make more sense.
Need Something Immediate & Tangible?
Try Our Online Assessment
Instead of putting a review together, you can evaluate your core's service with our online core assessment. It takes as little as 5 minutes to complete, and once your done, you'll receive your score automatically and recommendations via email.
See how your core is measuring up. Start the assessment now.