The Banking and Financial Services sector is changing rapidly owing to increased regulations, changing customer behaviour and expectations, and surmounting competition. To stay relevant and thrive in the present scenario, banking and financial services organizations need to be creative with their plans to distinguish themselves in 2023. They will need to delve deep into customer insights so that they can rightly gauge customer expectations and deliver for their loyal customer base.
You need to understand your customer base (omnichannel customer segmentation), their preferences (digital, self-service, or AI), and the kinds of journeys need to be planned to ensure repeat business. And for that, you need to have a deep understanding of customers, and based on that, you need to form your CX strategy and pass it on to your financial services call center outsourcing partner for implementation.
Let us delve deep into the customer experience trends that are affecting the banking industry at this point.
Omnichannel banking:
As digital banking is gaining popularity, so does the need to an omnichannel experience for banking customers. Your customers should experience a seamless transition between channels (such as online, mobile, and in-person) without having to restart their entire experience all over every single time. To provide a state-of-the-art omnichannel experience delivery, banks need to better understand each customer’s choices and journey. In 2023 and beyond, we can expect to experience a constant rise in various omnichannel banking trends.
Personalization:
To ensure that your bank remains competitive, it is becoming imperative to personalize the customer experience. It means you need to go beyond using your customer’s name during their interaction with your brand and find each customer’s needs and expectations. When you can personalize your experience with your customers in a meaningful way, you can strengthen your relationship with your customers.
So, how can you offer your customers a seamless and personalized experience? Simple, you need an omnichannel offering. Implementing a combined omnichannel strategy ensures that you are meeting your customers with all of the information relevant to them.
Data-driven insights:
To provide a fully personalized experience, you need access to correct and latest data. Such data can be leveraged to gain insights that can aid your business better understand your customers and make informed decisions about your various products, services, and communication initiatives. From data, agent performance, and conversation analytics to call tracking as well as sentiment data, your call center partner needs to have full access to the accurate information to enhance operations.
Using these three CX trends, you can improve your company’s customer experience strategy and resolve many CX challenges by leveraging the skills of an experienced and skilled contact center outsourcing partner.
Let us discuss how an experienced banking BPO can leverage these CX trends to help you overcome your business challenges:
Challenge 1: Ensuring efficiency in customer communication
Many day-to-day activities help financial services contact center to operate. And those activities need to be completed as swiftly and proficiently as possible to ensure the contact center’s success. Therefore, your contact center partner should be able to recalibrate systems and processes to ensure that you can deliver a superior CX to your customers at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
However, disconnected channels and fragmented data can be a threat to achieving CX success in this case.
Solution: Omnichannel communication strategy
To survive and thrive in this competitive business landscape, you need a well-organized omnichannel offering. It will equip your call center partner to deliver a consistent and satisfying customer experience across channels. Besides, an omnichannel stack with unified customer data can also be used as a customer segmentation tool, lead generator, and the foundation for personal journeys.
Unifying data across communication channels can break down information silos and help your company achieve:
- Improved brand reputation
- Enhanced CX
- Drive sales with quality service
- Create brand evangelists
It can also help you to increase sales and retention rates and help you find out the scope of improvements that may lead to a seamless customer journeys.
With a call center partner with omnichannel capability and the ability to work with unified customer data, you can:
- Engage with customers proactively
- Minimize customer attritions
- Increase first-contact resolution rates
- Minimize wait times
- Personalize every interaction.
Challenge 2: Rising service and staff costs for the banking sector
Banks and other financial services organizations constantly feel the pressure of rising costs in different spheres, including technology, labor, or customer acquisition. Traditional technology and information silos hamper your capacity to deliver a tailored and proactive customer experience. As a result, your bottom line is impacted.
If your outsourcing partner does not support omnichannel communication and does not have a unified data platform, it may lead to low customer engagement and further customer churn.
Here are some of the common problems that may occur:
- Agents will not have a comprehensive view of the customer’s account, reducing the engagement quality
- Instead of proactive communications from company about known issues, customers are compelled to contact you
- You cannot detect what’s causing frustration in customers, making it hard to optimize the overall performance.
- Your call center may also experience a high rate of agent churn owing to a lack of employee satisfaction.
Solution: A blend of human interactions, self-service, AI, and CX automation
To overcome the challenge, you need to look for a superior CX delivery by leveraging human agents, AI, self-service, and CX automation. With a call center partner that can integrate AI-powered knowledge bases and leverage CRM to boost customer interaction and enhance agent experience, it is possible to bring down the cost of labor and service.
Artificial intelligence can be used for issue classification, call routing, and issue resolution. Conversational IVRs can collect customer details to route callers to the right agent. In addition, those IVRs can be programmed to send SMS which initiate self-service interactions using chatbots.
You can also use AI for virtual agents, chatbots, speech and sentiment analysis, and much more.
AI will improve financial services contact centers in many ways in coming years — from self-service capabilities that add an unparalleled level of personalization, speed, and efficiency to hybrid functions, which use virtual agents to improve live agents’ performance.
Challenge 3: Increasing and ever-changing compliance and risk
Compliance and risk management became more complex than ever. With compliance hazard and financial regulations for protecting customer communication growing, TCPA action filings grew by 21%. And usual settlement per case is $6.6 million.
As regulatory demands go up, financial services and banking organizations are at peril of getting penalized if there’s a lack of insight into customer interactions or rigorous policy-based compliance evaluation.
Solution: A compliant call omnichannel center partner
Protect yourself from undesirable compliance risk with a call center partner that offers compliance-focused omnichannel support. A banking BPO always have updated knowledge of the latest regulatory changes and implements them in its training and operations. So, you can easily avert the compliance risks associated with outsourcing.
Wrapping up
To enhance its CX delivery, your banking organization needs to leverage the current CX trends and delve deep into customer insights. With the right financial services call center partner, you can not only do so but can also harness the power of technology and human connect to ensure a personalized, compliant, and omnichannel customer experience delivery at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
