A customer opens a mortgage calculator on a mobile app in the morning, walks into a branch at noon, and calls the contact centre in the evening. At each touchpoint, they are asked to re-identify themselves, handed a different document checklist, and effectively sent back to the beginning. A significant share of customer complaints at Turkish banks — including large ones — traces back to exactly these broken handoffs. The problem is not a technology deficit; it is the habit of channel-based thinking overriding journey-based design. Omnichannel banking aims to close the gap between these two perspectives — but doing so requires first understanding which journeys actually involve cross-channel transitions and where those transitions break down.
In a channel-based model, each touchpoint is optimised in isolation: the branch process is owned by branch management, the mobile app by the digital team, the contact centre by operations. This works up to a point, but the moment a customer moves from one channel to another, context is lost. Journey-based design starts instead from the customer’s goal — obtaining a loan, opening an account, making an investment — and treats every step toward that goal as a single coherent flow, regardless of which channel each step happens in. As of 2019, a portion of mid-sized Turkish banks are actively discussing this shift; yet their organisational structures and system architectures still mirror channel silos. The transition demands simultaneous movement on technology, organisation, and process design — and underestimating any one of these dimensions is where most programmes stall.
The loan application journey is the most concrete test case for this transition. A customer completes a preliminary application on the mobile app; the bank’s systems run an instant credit score check and return a pre-approval notification. The digital channel performs well up to this point. The real fracture comes next: the customer is directed to a branch to submit documents, and the branch representative either cannot access the pre-application data or re-enters it on a separate system. The customer repeats the same information a second time. Solving this requires the customer data layer to serve all channels from a single source — meaning the integration between the CRM and the loan origination system must provide real-time status sharing, not just periodic data transfer. This is a technically solvable problem; however, because it requires shared system ownership across multiple departments, the management alignment needed to execute it is consistently harder than the technical solution itself.
Customer journey mapping provides the analytical foundation for this transformation. The process must be observed across all touchpoints simultaneously: mobile app behavioural data, branch transaction logs, contact centre interaction records, and customer satisfaction surveys need to be brought together. The data warehouse infrastructure at Turkey’s larger banks already holds most of this data; what is typically missing is the analytical layer that connects it across the journey. Process mining tools are directly applicable here: working from actual transaction logs, they make visible at which step a customer switched channels, where they waited, and where they abandoned the process entirely. When a Turkish bank applies process mining to its mortgage journey, it typically finds that the majority of elapsed time between pre-application and contract signing consists of internal bank waiting periods rather than customer delays. That finding changes the prioritisation of improvements completely.
Organisational structure is the most resistant layer of this transformation. When channel teams are managed against their own KPIs — branch footfall, mobile transaction volume, average handle time in the contact centre — each team optimises its own channel, but no one owns the end-to-end journey. Some banks moving toward journey-based models are defining a ‘journey owner’ role: a product manager responsible for the loan journey is evaluated against metrics that span all channels. This structure conflicts with the traditional hierarchy in Turkish banking; the resource and authority tension between branch network management and digital banking determines whether these roles function in practice or exist only on paper. An organisational chart that looks correct does not come to life until budgeting and performance management are realigned to match it.
On the technology side, omnichannel banking requires a layered architecture rather than a single large-scale system replacement. Customer identity management must work consistently across all channels; authentication and authorisation should be handled from a central layer. Customer profiles and transaction history must be shared in near real time; a branch representative speaking with a customer should be able to see which steps were completed on the mobile channel before the visit. The notification and communication layer should be triggered by journey state rather than channel logic: when an application is approved, the customer should receive both a push notification and an SMS, and a branch appointment should be created automatically. In Turkey, building all of these layers from scratch is rarely feasible; adding an API layer on top of the existing core banking system and advancing incrementally is a more realistic path. That approach carries its own technical debt, however, and managing that debt over time requires deliberate architectural governance.
Redesigning the customer journey in omnichannel banking begins with identifying which journeys actually contain cross-channel transitions — and which of those transitions are causing measurable drop-off. Attempting to transform every journey simultaneously disperses resources and completes none of them. Prioritising journeys with high abandonment rates — loan applications, account openings, complaint resolution — provides both concrete measurement opportunities and the organisational learning needed to scale the approach. Technology is necessary but not sufficient; without clear process ownership, aligned performance metrics, and defined decision authority, even a well-designed architecture will not deliver the expected outcome. In Turkey’s 2019 banking environment, currency pressure and compressed margins make investment prioritisation genuinely difficult. Tying each programme milestone to a measurable customer or operational outcome is not a reporting formality — it is what keeps the initiative funded through the next budget cycle.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on May 13, 2019 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.