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6 Tips to Improve Your Bank’s Online and Omnichannel Customer Experience

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While the new financial experience may involve fewer person-to-person interactions, clients still expect high levels of personalization.

Financial services Customer Experience (CX) encompasses every customer interaction with an institution on every platform. While this used to primarily happen over a teller counter, the new omnichannel CX includes apps, embedded finance, online systems, digital communications, and contact centers – any way users access their services. The better a customer’s experience at every touchpoint, the more likely they are to trust that company with their finances.

From their initial deposit to their many investment milestones, here are six tips for creating a better experience that your customers will know they can bank on.

1. Build Trust with Digital-first Customers – Digital money management can be daunting for new customers, especially if they are unfamiliar with your brand. Earning client trust can be challenging, but there are ways to make them feel more comfortable using your products. Center your company’s mission and values with consistent messaging and back it up with your services. Clients are concerned about the security of their transactions, so be transparent with your compliance and data privacy policies.

2. Prioritize Self-Service – Currently, most transactions originate digitally, with customers accessing self-service portals or making payments through embedded financial technology. Online transactions like trades or transfers are automated and fast. They generally require little intervention from human agents, making them efficient for the client and cost-effective for the financial institution.

3. Add a Human Touch – In an era where customer interactions are limited, each point of human-to-human contact is valuable. When self-service and AI can’t solve an issue, it’s up to the human agent to step in and provide exceptional customer service. Empower agents with up-to-date information about the client’s history to easily step into the conversation for personalized, empathetic support.

4. Create Connections Between Customers and Employees – Clients will feel more comfortable knowing their money is in the hands of knowledgeable, dependable financial employees, so make sure the transition between self-service and live agent assistance is seamless. Ensuring contact center agents are always available via phone or chat and equipped with top-of-the-line communications solutions leads to faster resolution rates and happier customers. UC solutions like AI-assisted agent support for dynamic real-time responses and work-from-anywhere technology will empower your people to respond professionally and customers will feel confident in their care.

5. Optimize Your Workforce – Human capital is the most valuable – and one of the most expensive – elements of running an organization. Finding the right balance of automated solutions and human expertise can help manage budgetary concerns while improving employee and customer satisfaction. Automated workforce management technology uses analytics to track times of peak demand, creating strategic schedules for flexible, efficient contact center staffing.

6. Collect Valuable Feedback – Today’s digital-first customers quickly tap a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon, but gathering meaningful feedback is essential in providing high-quality financial experiences. Whether it’s a satisfaction survey at the end of a call or a net promoter score after an online chat, give customers a chance to share their thoughts. Their insight can identify pain points and lead to CX improvements you hadn’t considered.

Improve Your Financial Services CX with TCI

The pivot to online financial services is an opportunity for traditional banks, credit unions, and other institutions to provide new levels of exceptional customer experiences. Contact TCI today at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 


Follow These 4 Tips to Keep Your Voice & IT Networks Up and Running

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Many businesses manage an IT environment that includes a complicated maze of technology services and equipment of varying ages, performance, and overall health.

Even for the most tech-savvy, it can be a challenge to identify potential problems before something fails and disaster strikes.

Fortunately, there are best practices you can employ now to minimize the risk…

1. Infrastructure updates – Many problems can be prevented with proactive hardware and software updates that help keep pace with security vulnerabilities and interoperability demands.

2. Monitoring – End-to-end network monitoring will provide vital insights into the health of the devices on your network. You can catch a misconfigured router or endpoint and deal with failing equipment to prevent voice quality or connection problems.

3. Go deeper with analytics – Usage data can tell you in advance when it’s time to expand your network or add new licenses. Alarm analytics can direct you to the most important issues on your network faster.

4. Get a partner to help – Networks are not created equal. They all have quirks that ‘out of the box’ network management systems can miss. Remote monitoring and specialized enterprise-class tools can see more events on your network that could impact your communications.

Be proactive to head off communications downtime before it happens… Let’s talk about your Voice and IT environment.

Contact us today: (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 




The 9 Most Important Call Center Trends of 2022

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We’ve seen a lot of changes to the call center and customer experience landscape over the years, from cloud communications and virtual agents to more strategic thinking around analytics, more flexible social media interactions, and innovative ways to involve artificial intelligence. And when the pandemic pushed businesses to modernize their business communications overnight, we’ve seen even more shifts in how businesses meet the evolving needs of both customers and their employees.

Here are nine technology trends that are helping companies deliver the best quality customer experience. See how far your business has come in building customer relationships that last — or which of these trends may need to be on this year’s to-do list.

1. Artificial Intelligence

As early adopters continue honing AI applications for call routing, we expect to see more connections forged between various media channels and streamlined call center response.

2. Digital Transformation

A forward-looking digital transformation strategy is going to be essential for business competitiveness. And it’s not just about using the right channels to interact with customers where they are; the smartest businesses are integrating technologies to provide full customer context with each interaction and leveraging system data to provide proactive service.

3. Better Contact Center Analytics

Gone are the days of relying on supervisor skills and know-how to get the most out of contact center agents. Now, even smaller businesses are taking advantage of sophisticated analytics to turn data – like call and screen recordings, chats, SMS messages, and more – into useful feedback for their agents. We expect more advancements in analytics as companies continue to implement more unified communications platforms and strategies.

4. Omnichannel Communications

More businesses are recognizing that while a customer journey may begin on one channel, valuable insight and feedback from the customer can be gained on a completely different channel. Responsive businesses are using this trend to create a superb customer experience by unifying communications across channels into one stream. This helps their customers by connecting them with an agent who knows their purchase and service history and provides valuable context. Most importantly, the two-way conversation is public on a social media platform, so other customers can see how the business solved the problem.

5. Cloud Communications

Many businesses have already adopted cloud communications as part of their communications strategies, but cloud communications have become particularly important for contact centers. The steady increase in remote call agents has made cloud communications a necessity for businesses who want to take advantage of seamless team communications and collaboration. With cloud communications, traditional office-based contact centers can take on new locations, and grow and contract workforces as market needs demand.

6. Employee Engagement

Just as customer expectations have evolved in the last few years, so have the expectations of the employees that make quality customer experience possible. And dissatisfaction in the work environment and culture has led to high agent attrition in the contact center space and beyond. Businesses that want to remain competitive will provide their employees with the culture and technology that empowers an efficient, productive, and flexible workforce.

7. Flexible Working Options

Lower overhead, time zone flexibility, and variable working hours have made remote contact center workers a stable trend in 2022. With constantly improving unified communications, remote workers have become a permanent and beneficial part of the contact center environment. By using collaboration tools, contact center agents can be mobile, with access to real-time analytics and customer context.

8. AI-Powered Self-Service Tools

The high priority on process improvement and self-service since the pandemic has addressed the issue of increasing workload for contact center agents, as well as the difficulties around achieving the desired service levels or Average Speed of Answer (ASA). Giving customers information quickly helps reduce call volumes, and easy-to-navigate FAQs help narrow down calls to those with sufficiently complex issues. Quick access to self-serve solutions also provides an emotional benefit to customers (that DIY-fix high!) and reduces overall call times.

9. SMB’s Leveraging All Employees to Support Customers

SMBs are extending traditional contact center agent desktop features to employees that work outside of the contact center to supplement customer-facing employees. Blended UC/CC solutions that bring customer and employee experiences together into a single user experience tear down the silos between traditional contact center agents and the rest of the organization.

If you need more help determining how to apply these trends to your call center, TCI’s local experts are here to help. Contact us today: (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.