As banks, insurers, credit unions, and other financial providers face a disruptive economy, digitalisation has led to rising customer expectations. New business trends, competition and technology entering the market present both opportunity and threat. The ability to act quickly and effectively can positively impact long-term success. In turn, this may lead to a key focus on customer experience (CX).
From account management, loans, and investment services — to payments, transactions, security, and fraud, an innovative CX strategy can drive a competitive advantage. Likewise, it presents financial services companies with an excellent opportunity to integrate customer experience with digital innovation.
Technology assists Financial Services Contact Centres to deliver customer services across several support channels and payment platforms, and process customer requests more efficiently. Where it’s important to deliver a fast response to customers across multiple communication channels, contact centre data offers actionable insights to understand how best to invest in digital technology.
In recent years, automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and routing systems have helped transform contact centre operations. In the financial services contact centre, new technology must integrate legacy systems to prevent vital information loss and process disruptions that would negatively impact employees and customers.
For banks, insurance providers and credit unions striving to improve customer experience and accelerate digital transformation, seamless integration and business continuity are key.
Omnichannel CX
Contact centres need effective channels of communication to meet customers where they are and through their preferred channel depending on their demographic, issue, or urgency. A seamless omnichannel approach across voice, mobile, email, web chat, and social media enables customer requests to be managed efficiently.
IVR and self-service
Automated phone system technology known as interactive voice response (IVR) can reduce ticket queues. It allows customers to access recorded information without speaking to a customer service advisor. Callers can have their request routed to a live advisor if they need to speak with customer service.
Simple customer queries can be answered efficiently through a self-service portal that allows customers to solve problems using messaging, community data sharing etc.
24/7/365 live support
For bank contact centres offering products or services that may require immediate attention, 24-hour customer support, 365 days a year could strengthen customer satisfaction. This may be particularly beneficial for fraud, identity theft and compliance hotlines.
Banks that choose to outsource their contact centres can remove the need for in-house shift work, or longer hours, and gain access to a team of trained specialists who are available 24/7/365 to provide quality customer support.
What do customers want from a contact centre?
Customers are increasingly seeking an improved experience in their interactions. According to Salesforce Research 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
Some factors that can strengthen customer experience include:
Fast, quality response
Managing customer service effectively requires measuring response time i.e. how fast customer enquiries are answered. Customer satisfaction is best achieved with fast response times that maintain high quality. Due to fluctuations in customer demand, the ability to efficiently scale a contact centre up during busy periods, again while maintaining speed and quality of response, is essential to reducing wait times.
Personalised experience
Customers wants to feel that the organisation they interact with notes their preferences every time to save them from having to repeat information. This means delivering a personalised experience completely tailored to their needs.
Personalisation offers insurance providers the ability to understand their customers better and more dynamically, ultimately resulting in an enhanced customer experience. A data-driven approach can aid insurers in retaining customers in a similar way to retailers who use customer preferences to recommend products. This includes insurance policy sales, renewals, and claims processing.
Empathy
Customer empathy is a great differentiator in stressful scenarios. The ability to engage in active listening techniques and demonstrate empathy when communicating with customers yields dividends. Here, Financial Services Contact Centres can make a positive difference and enhance loyalty, particularly in times of financial difficulty for customers. Securing the right calibre of contact centre employees, along with comprehensive onboarding and training can advance empathetic communication.
How can Banks, Insurers and other Financial Services continue to enhance CX?
In an age of digitalisation, call routing, ticket management, and customer relationship management technologies are critical tools for managing customer demands.
Similarly, a well-established quality assurance programme is essential to maintaining an excellent customer experience. Improving quality levels requires monitoring and evaluating performance, providing feedback, mentoring, and coaching, and implementing continuous improvement strategies to boost customer satisfaction.
By leveraging the capabilities of a BPO vendor for Contact Centre Outsourcing, highly trained specialists across customer service can handle card processing, account management, loan applications, insurance claims and more. Process automation, a BPO strength has accelerated the demand for outsourcing as Financial Services providers actively look to address regulatory challenges, streamline their operations, and adopt the right CX solution.
In addition, reputable contact centre outsourcing providers have robust security measures in place, including data encryption, ID&V; an essential part of fraud prevention and regulatory compliance for financial services providers.
Furthermore, contact centre outsourcing offers business continuity in the event of disruptions or disasters to minimise service interruptions. If you’re reviewing potential vendors, a trusted, agile BPO provider can serve as an invaluable BCP partner.
In the race to develop new digital products and services with faster time to market — strong leadership, governance, capability, and scale offer advantages.
In such a competitive environment for banks, insurance companies, credit unions and other financial services organisations — a quality, consistent customer experience can improve market share and deliver significant process and cost efficiencies.