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contact center for banking & finance

How Can The Finance Sector Perform Better Using Contact Centers?

Abhirami

08 June 2023

A contact center’s ultimate aim is to provide customers with efficient sales, customer, and technical support. Content center solutions are becoming more crucial as customers prefer on-demand services. Customers expect high standards for the services they choose. Businesses typically struggle if there is no one available to respond to consumer inquiries for service or support. The companies that have contact centers excel in this area and can better assist customers.

Providing outstanding customer service encourages repeat business. Customers in the banking and finance industries look for convenience, timeliness, and competence. In such a competitive market where providing a personalized customer experience is crucial, contact center solutions will be able to provide customer services that promote brand loyalty.

The personalized service that banks have traditionally offered in person, is exactly what contact centers are delivering now.  Financial institutions are eager to give their consumers options that streamline transaction procedures and make them easier and more efficient in light of technological advancements. However, fraudulent transactions, defaulting clients, money laundering, etc also need to be taken care of. This is among the main reasons why successful contact center solutions are necessary.

That takes us to the point, the Importance of Contact Center solutions in Financial Services.

Content:

1. What is a Financial Services Contact Center?

2. Challenges of customer service in banks

3. Benefits of Contact Center Solution in Financial Services

4. Solutions For Better Operations In Banking & Finance

 

1. What is a Financial Services Contact Center?

A contact center solution for financial institutions is a sophisticated communication system that manages open cases and transactions within financial offices by handling incoming and outgoing calls, SMS, messages, and emails.

Contact center solution ensures efficiency in the following financial service businesses:

- Insurance Companies
- Banks
- Credit Unions
- Financial Advisors
- Lending Institutions

 

2. Challenges of customer service in banks:

Lack of personalization:

Customers believe that major banks handle them impersonally and robotically in general. According to data from Business Wire, "72% of respondents evaluated personalization as "very important," while only 8% said it was not.," It is indeed what people value the most.

Banks and other financial institutions must use personalization to address the different demands and preferences of each of their clients. AI Chatbots, Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine learning, are a few of the best contact center solutions for providing individualized experiences. It is not just responding to the customer with their first name but understanding the customer profile and engaging with them accordingly. AI-based systems can analyze customer data and cluster them and segment them according to their preference and likeness. Customers within one cluster can be provided personalization which can be different in another cluster.

Long wait times:

Delayed service delivery and longer wait times are other prominent areas where most financial institutions fall short. Consumer wait times will have a detrimental impact on customer satisfaction. For banks, the issue is that overstaffing their branches drives up operational costs. Then, how do we bring balance?

To avoid losing customers, financial institutions can leverage technology and automation especially to scale customer service and control costs.

Customer Retention is low:

Customers are more likely to abandon a bank because of poor customer service than because of subpar products. To avoid losing them, you must live up to their expectations. Every firm understands that loyal clients are more profitable, and keeping current customers is less expensive than finding new ones. For banks as well, the same is true. Long-term customer retention is crucial if you want to keep your firm profitable. To do that, excellent customer service is essential. And you may accomplish this by integrating contact center solutions into regular operations.


3. Benefits of Contact Center Solution in Financial Services:

The advantages of using contact center solutions for financial institutions are numerous. It enables the financial institution to:

- Ensure that communication and responses are consistent across multiple channels and platforms.

- Streamline and handle calls more efficiently while monitoring the performance of the contact center.

- Gain access to a single source of truth for customer data, such as contact information, account information, and so on. This data is easily accessible to contact center staff with the click of a button. Furthermore, the contact center can record calls to provide agents with a better context for interactions, accountability, and training.

- Accept payments securely and confidentially, paving the way for a better customer experience.

- Reduce the cost of equipment and long-distance calls.

- Determine the most effective metrics for monitoring and improving customer satisfaction, as well as recognizing and rewarding top-performing agents.

- Easily scale their contact center operations, without breaking a sweat about the call volumes or agent availability.

- Reach a larger global audience without incurring additional overhead or costs.

- Improve the training for the contact center representatives and elevate their knowledge of the company as well as boost their skills.

- Utilize the appropriate digital tools to improve the customer experience at each touchpoint or milestone along the customer journey.

Live Chat Solutions:

Increase sales conversions: Live chat can instantly respond to customer queries and aid in faster decision-making, resulting in more sales. It can also approach customers proactively; for example, if they are stuck on a page/point, you can trigger a chat window to open with an invitation to chat.

Deliver Real-Time support: People want to organize their finances on the go and find answers quickly online, and live chat is the best option. Live chat is a powerful tool for combating the impersonal and bureaucratic feel of banking institutions. It gives your customers easy access to personal human support.

Secure file transmission: Implementing a GDPR-compliant live chat solution makes live chat suitable for sending files directly to your customers.

Address customer concerns immediately: To provide better customer service, live chat provides instant solutions for banking and financial queries using digital engagement tools such as video chat and co-browsing.

Reduce customer support costs: By handling multiple chats and providing faster responses with canned responses. Live chat increases service rep efficiency through automated routing and provides better banking support.

Provide a Personalized Experience: Personalized experience pays off in any industry. In the banking industry, video chat is a fantastic tool that can improve a variety of aspects. Video chat in customer service for banks has increased by 70%. Its value increases even more when combined with other customer engagement tools.

When the situation is complex and visual cues are crucial, a video chat platform is the only way to ensure the best personal support.

Video Chat:

Live customer engagement: Video chat allows businesses to interact directly with customers on their websites or mobile apps, increasing engagement significantly.

Provide a personalized experience - When you combine a video chat platform with other customer engagement tools like live chat and chatbots, it's simple to provide personalized experiences at any time throughout the journey.

Faster issue resolution - By combining co-browsing and video chat, it is possible to collaborate with customers in real time and resolve issues more quickly.

Provide proactive support - Once you've learned about your customer's journey, cross-platform video chat can help you provide proactive support and effective engagement.

Leverage a Banking Chatbot: In the past year, we have witnessed finance institutions massively shifting to artificial intelligence (AI) for improved automation solutions to satisfy the ever-rising expectations of their clients.
There has been a lot of interest in conversational AI in particular.  At a fraction of the expense of hiring human customer care agents, customer experience is greatly improved by Conversational AI's interactive features, speed, and efficiency. With several banks introducing AI-powered conversational solutions, CZ Bot was one of the most preferred solutions. 

Chatbot:

- Engage customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: A banking chatbot can be deployed on the website or on browsing pages to initiate conversations. It enables them to analyze user behavior or interests, as well as introduce banking products to them.

- Provide a great conversational experience: AI bots respond accurately to customer input and provide conversational experiences at every stage of the journey. They route complex chats to the appropriate human representative to ensure humanized support. 

- Provide personalized services: With the help of chatbot analytics (which captures user behavior, trends, and intent completion), you can provide customers with relevant and personalized services and offers.

- Automated FAQ support: Bots are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and banks can use them to solve customer problems at any time without requiring human intervention. Complex queries can be answered by AI bots with advanced algorithms and machine learning capabilities.

- Offers an Omnichannel Experience: Banking services are accessed from various platforms and devices today. Customers increasingly take for granted the ability to access their accounts and information from any location and on any device. With standalone touchpoints like ATMs, Email systems, or call centers, customer experience is discreet and in siloes. Choosing an omnichannel strategy has thus become crucial in today's era to keep up with the competitive waves in customer experience.

The number of ways that customers can contact and communicate with your business online increases every minute. There are countless options for clients to contact you, including Facebook, Instagram, email, SMS, chat, telephone, etc. A solid customer support approach for financial services is to invest in a system that can communicate with your customers through whichever channel they’ve preferred.

Omnichannel Solution:

- Faster resolution rate:

Omnichannel banks can handle customer requests faster by utilizing digital tools and strategies, increasing both the resolution rate and customer satisfaction.

- Improved customer experience:

When banks engage in all online and offline customer service channels and provide consistent support, customer experience improves.

- Streamline the customer journey for better insights:

With conversation history, banks can easily understand the customer lifecycle and provide personalized real-time support.

- Reduce customer churn:

Customers expect instant responses, and when they are entertained across their preferred channels in real-time, customer churn is significantly reduced. However, to provide an omnichannel customer experience, banks should combine traditional and digital components.

 

4. Solutions For Better Operations In Banking & Finance:

- Create a Knowledge Base for Self Help:

Self-help options can assist your clients in finding information, resolving issues, and discovering solutions on their own. With the best contact center solution, banks and other financial institutions can use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and automated call-routing tools to automatically send customers to self-service choices. To teach your customers, your customer care representative should be knowledgeable about the products and services that your business provides. Once you have a good idea about the product and services you offer, then your customer service representatives will be better able to routinely suggest better solutions and services.

A voice calling capability with a cloud contact center (CCaaS) will let you manage call queues, so you won't miss the chance to help them. With features like voicemail, call queue, and queue callback, you can be sure to provide customer service as effectively as possible. When making inbound or outgoing calls, the power dialer feature makes it simple to dial many phone numbers quickly in succession. The contact center agent's screen has pop-up windows that show all of the customer account information and customer journey. They have access to all of the customer's information while they are conversing with the consumer.

- Streamlining the banking experience with voicebots:

Voice bots are a fantastic tool for giving your customers a personalized customer experience. Voice bots can offer a better customer experience through automation and machine learning, enabling users to save time and have a better overall experience. As the banking sector implements new technology, the operational cost of human call centers and outbound service channels reduces, resulting in major benefits and cost savings. A voicebot makes every task easier, enhancing and streamlining the banking experience. Integrating these solutions would streamline the banking process.

- Customer feedback using IVR:

Gaining customer feedback is a crucial step in gathering client insights for your products and services. Banks or financial institutions should communicate with customer service via email, live chat, or phone calls. The banks can gather their consumers' feedback and thoughts by interacting with them on these channels. Also, using a feedback mechanism like an IVR survey or in-chat, or email survey to collect feedback will let you capture the CSAT score per interaction. The consumer wants consistent service across all touchpoints and channels of contact as well as round-the-clock assistance. Therefore, maintaining consumers' satisfaction and happiness is every company's top priority. Insights from this feedback will enable you to upgrade and develop your products, which will be advantageous for both you and the customer. Customers will have more faith and loyalty in your organization if they feel that their input is valued and taken into consideration.

- Collection bot:

Sometimes the human characteristics of the debt collector make personal debt collection calls more effective. However, it might be challenging to guarantee that every business call runs properly if you don't have a competent person or agent on the team. With a bot, you can make sure that your customers are constantly greeted with the appropriate tone and information, increasing the likelihood that they will pay. Additionally, bots can follow up with callers who are unable to take the call. This increases their chances of making digital contact and allows them to reach more people who might have missed the initial call.

- Call Whispering and Live Coaching:

During a call, your frontline agents will require assistance with everything from pricing negotiations to quality control and onboarding. When dealing with a difficult customer, having some support from a colleague or a manager can be beneficial. It aids in the resolution of the problem and the maintenance of relationships. However, the customer should be unaware that another person (manager/supervisor) is involved. Supervisors can join the call using the live coaching function. They can direct or coach the call agent in resolving the customer's issue.

- Call Recording:

Listening and recording conversations is now commonplace. These voice clips can be used to increase the efficiency of agents. It can also be used while agents are being trained. With call transcriptions, the entire call can be easily summarised and key intents can be found out easily. This is a plus for you in terms of customer satisfaction and team productivity.

- Screen Recording:

A scenario where a screen capture of an agent solving a problem is recorded. These recordings are beneficial for coaching, quality control, and compliance. The screen capture is done as soon as the agent starts the call and gets over as soon as the call gets over. So, it helps to understand if the agent is facing difficulty in finding the right data or on the right screen when the discussion is on.


Conclusion:

Three out of four clients in the banking industry say their interactions with contact centers affect their choice to make a purchase. When a large number of customers claim that even one negative encounter would encourage them to stop using a company they like. The importance of customer service is quite obvious.

So, if you want to stay competitive and sustainable in the finance sector, what you need is contact center solutions that manage your customers' inquiries and make their experience worthwhile. As discussed above, for a financial institution, contact centers carry out a variety of duties. These impactful contact center solutions need to be implemented; C-Zentrix can effectively help you with such implementation and enhance the ROI.

 

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