5 Ways CX Can Help Financial Institutions Serve Clients Better

Today, banks and financial institutions face great competitive pressure as consumers have more options to manage their assets and transactions.

The Difference Between Customers and “Your Customers”

The fact that banking benefits are no longer homogeneous is proof that the market is full of users who value unique financial products and services. For example, when financing a car or a mortgage, some borrowers may turn to an online transactional lender, while others prefer personal relationships established with a trusted bank or financial institution. The point here is not to say that one form is better than another, but that consumers have the option of choosing the one that best suits their needs.

In highly competitive markets, it is common for companies to target a segment of customers who have similar expectations and then target them specifically. This explains why it is so important to know who “your customers” are, what they value most, and then offer them what meets their needs.

Unprecedented Era of Digital Transformation

Technology is used as a means to speed up and improve the service. It also applies to helping companies innovate faster, which is critical now more than ever because agility is what it takes to keep up with rapidly changing customer demands. This explains why the financial services industry is in an unprecedented era of intensive digital transformation.

5 Ways CX Can Help Financial Institutions Serve Clients Better

1) Listen To Understand

Surveys and VoC (Voice of the Customer) tools are useful for understanding what customers are saying, but it is just as valuable to analyse their interactions. By doing so, you can detect sentiment and find where unnecessary effort is exerted or expectations are not being met. For example, when applying for a loan online, how many chat sessions are started because users can’t complete the process? How many applications are abandoned? When you contact customer service, what is the root cause? Is the client calm, frustrated or angry? Listening can also be achieved by analysing the results. What makes the difference between a successfully completed loan application and one without? When you enable listening capabilities and then act on what customers demand, the results are optimal.

2) Offer The Right Experience

When it comes to successfully delivering satisfying customer experiences, you need to deliver the right solution, at the right time, and in the right way. For example, if a person wants to open a new account at 9pm, if he wants to speak to an agent, can he do that? Delivering those seamless experiences is possible when you have CX applications and applications to design and implement what customers require. This can include voice of the customer (VoC), digital engagement (omnichannel), live support interaction, back-office and AI (Artificial Intelligence) integration, automation, and organizing a great customer journey.

3) Deliver Smarter Self-Service

A key factor in delivering the right experience is offering intelligent digital self-service. When people think of self-service, the first thing that comes to mind is AI-based customer service bots.

Self-service tools, which are often overlooked, include easily accessible knowledge bases and automated “guides”. Knowledge bases are invaluable when used to help actively searching customers find answers to questions like what qualifications are needed to get a credit card or how to make a late payment. On the other hand, automated guides interactively offer web visitors more information or to suggest next steps. The guides are a great self-service option to advise users on how to select the right account or how to accurately complete a loan application.

Finally, it is worth noting that the combination of interaction data specific to the banking sector, advances in machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) are now producing much smarter bots that are used successfully for self-service tasks like managing account balances, getting app status, making changes, facilitating payments, or answering frequently asked questions.

4) Empower Frontline Employees

Call centre software has to reduce complexity and make it easier for employees to focus solely on solving customer needs. This starts with smart workflow management. By intelligently routing and queuing omnichannel interactions into a single queue that scales with an agent’s skills. It means working behind the scenes to accumulate customer histories and integrating them into CRM and other back-office systems and making them available to the employee, as well as using AI to guide agent actions based on interactions and results.

Additionally, process automation can be used to complete after-call work with precision. It also equates to providing constructive feedback and training that enables agents to improve. This can provide a strong boost to the brand and the resulting satisfaction customers receive as employees display confidence, competence and professionalism with every live support interaction.

5) Innovate Faster

Making transformative changes is hard. But it is even more difficult to perform them with agility. The dynamics of the banking industry change rapidly and customer preferences require constant adaptation.

Having a single vendor CX engagement platform is key. Obsolescence and incompatibility in any part of the customer experience technology portfolio can hinder both innovation and agility in adapting to changing consumer preferences.

How To Harness the Power of Customer Experience (CX) in Banking?

The best way to thrive in the financial services industry is to lean on and harness the power of banking CX to not only identify and understand who your customers are and what they really want, but also to give them what they value.

Transforming customer journeys and experiences can yield huge benefits that translate into increased profitability. For example, self-service increases capacity and allows for more live support interactions without incremental investment. In addition, training, automation and AI reduce the average time to handle, which reduces the cost per contact and per service.

There is a strong connection between customer satisfaction and revenue. Customer acquisition costs are lower and retention rates and associated lifetime value are higher.