In the post-COVID era, finance customer demands are changing. To meet those needs, financial services institutions need to make the customer experience the starting point for process design. There are two trends dominating the effectiveness of customer experience delivered by financial services.
- The rise of agile new market players, which is increasing competition and disrupting traditional banking.
- The increased use of digital channels, with more and more customers moving away from face-to-face and telephone interactions, a trend fast-tracked by the pandemic.
These trends seems great in theory, but many interactions within financial services are complex – and customers still want the reassurance of speaking to a human where money is concerned.
This means digital channels can never replace those personalised telephone interactions that many customers still crave. Investing in personalisation empowers financial services to deliver the service that customers are looking for in 2022.
Why phone calls are still necessary for good customer experiences?
Customers and brands alike are moving towards digital as their preferred customer service experience. However, phone calls to financial services still represent many contact points that the brand will have with its users.
Customers care about the safety of their money and when calling to discuss finances, stress levels can be high. Financial services need to ensure that their customer service team is well prepared to offer excellent service.
For example, customers find it frustrating when they are bounced around by automation. Especially if you’re calling with an enquiry that requires more nuance than deflected call channels can offer. The ability to speak to a well-trained agent who can anticipate and understand customer’s needs or concerns is the key to providing excellent customer experiences.
The importance of customer experiences
Simply put, the customer experience can make or break a customer’s trust in your business. If a customer requires vital information, a slow or ineffectual response from the agent who takes their call can damage your brand reputation.
Most incoming phone calls will be from customers with questions about what is happening with, or to, their finances - and the number of these requests can overwhelm your contact centre without proper processes in place.
Call centres are faced with a challenge. Each phone call is important for both the customer and the brand, and the user could require urgent information on a wide variety of issues. Prepping each agent to be ready for whatever query comes up is difficult and requires a diligent plan of action based on real-time data.
Customers are struggling during the recession
Talk of a recession in the UK have been ramping up in the past few weeks, and there is a lack of communication from the UK government on how they are going to tackle the ongoing financial crisis. Even today, questions surrounding the safety of pensions are being raised. Mortgage payments are at risk of skyrocketing by hundreds of pounds a month, and homeowners in the UK must make long-term plans to combat the increased rates.
The financial crisis in the UK is a dark cloud at the forefront of the general population’s mind, and their valid concerns about their pensions and mortgages are directed towards their chosen supplier of financial services. Each of these concerned calls requires careful, effective and intelligent service from customer service agents across all FSIs.
Recession CX 101: How to prepare your CX agents
There are three fundamental problems that FSIs need to address:
- Using each call as an opportunity to establish trust with your customers.
- Giving your agents with the information and skills needed to tackle nuanced and emotional requests.
- The ability to effectively handle and resolve high volumes of daily calls.
Call analytics can help. First, the mood of a caller and how an agent adapts to it can greatly impact the outcome of a conversation. With speech analytics tools like Conversation Analytics, you can better understand key talking points of each call, as well as its eventual outcome, enabling you to give nuanced training to contact centre staff. This helps to curate efficient customer journeys and maintain the trust in your business.
Second, Conversation Analytics can help you rate every call you to receive and organise recordings by result, to train staff at handling policy queries correctly to provide a better customer experience. This drives improvement in the short term and produces a better-performing team with a lower staff turnover in the long run.
Third, using Conversation Analytics to monitor calls at scale can help you understand how often the keywords that matter to the business – such as mortgage or pension – are appearing in conversations. By knowing what exactly customers are calling to ask about, you can streamline the call deflection channels to give swift answers to customers- reducing the overall number of calls for your agents to handle.
Future opportunities
The recession poses both a problem and an opportunity for FSIs and their customer experience teams. By employing technology to streamline the customer journey, managers can use those insights to train their agents to provide excellent customer service, and not just protect their brand’s reputation- but enhance it.
Want to unlock the insights from your conversations with customers? Start a conversation with us today.
Originally published in Global Banking & Finance Review.
