The taste of this new class of clients clashes with the traditional mode of service that dominates the financial sector. They grew up in a completely digital environment. They have no attachment to the legacy systems that banks and finance companies have clung to for years, despite the wave of new technologies in business and communications.
A 2017 report from Accenture indicated that 71% of financial services consumers are open to using “fully computer-generated support for banking services.” Clearly, most consumers are ready to go fully digital.
This perspective presents a problem for legacy-loving companies, and tackling the situation appropriately means acting decisively now. It is no longer enough to automate customer support through a solid knowledge base or canned responses to live chat on the web. What is needed now is to design customer care and the entire customer experience to adapt and enhance an increasingly digital customer journey. At a minimum, integrating your voice communication tools and your customer records, such as the Salesforce Cisco phone integration, for example, would allow your customer service teams to optimize the way they deliver service by ensuring that customers Conversation data is captured at each point of contact with the customer.
Transforming the entire customer experience from traditional to digital takes a lot of time and work to complete, but gradual changes can still have an impact on CX. Financial service providers can begin their transformation by injecting these trends and technologies into their CX strategy:
Self service
The first customer service point of contact for most finance consumers is not social media, the phone, or email. It is actually self service. More than 80% of consumers choose to use a web or mobile self-service application rather than speaking with a customer service representative on the phone. You shouldn’t expect your call center team to be on the front line of customer service. Customers only turn to their phones when they want to escalate their concerns. Even then, having a CTI solution in place like Salesforce-Cisco phone integration ensures that every customer interaction is recorded in your CRM.
Financial services consumers prefer self-service because it gives them more control. That is, self-service means that customers dictate when and where they will interact with their provider. It also allows consumers more freedom over their financial activities without disruptive ads or not-so-subtle suggestions from CS representatives. As customers demand to be more independent from their vendors, financial services companies also feel more compelled to offer better self-service options through native web applications and automated CS technologies.
Chatbots and virtual assistants
The demand for faster and more efficient services has finally led to this: 85% of customer interactions will be automated by 2020, according to Gartner. Chatbots and smart assistants are finding their way across various verticals, serving various purposes from customer support, marketing, and sales. These robots, powered by artificial intelligence, are used by the world’s largest banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, HSBC (Hong Kong) and SEB (Sweden).
Chatbots allow banks and financial services companies to provide efficient, personalized, and responsive service to customers at minimal cost. Chatbots are available 24/7 and are capable of quickly matching customer inquiries to solutions. Some are also programmed to receive leads, and the more advanced ones can make personalized recommendations based on past interactions, customer data, and other factors.
Critics of chatbot technology say that these tools lack the empathy of CS’s human representatives. While that is true, we must also recognize that chatbots improve this aspect over time. Machine learning algorithms help these virtual assistants learn more about the art of human conversation from experience. With such capabilities, chatbots prove to be sufficient to handle basic customer service inquiries, pleasing consumers with their efficiency and effectiveness.
Omnichannel service
These days, consumers interact with their financial service providers at a multitude of touch points, from online, to the branch, and even on mobile devices. Omnichannel service means connecting all of these touch points to create a seamless, consistent, and enjoyable experience for customers. In other words, it means allowing customers to move from one touch point to another without feeling an interruption or disconnect.
Creating an omnichannel experience for customers is not a new trend. Back in 2014, a Forrester survey already established omnichannel banking as one of the top five concerns for finance professionals for business application transformation. However, many banks and finance companies still lag behind in this area, due to unsustainable organizational and operational divisions between marketing, sales, and customer service.
Banks that want to overcome this problem must change their mindset from product-centric to customer-centric. Putting the customer at the center of their CX question will allow them to see touch points more clearly and accurately anticipate consumer needs in every interaction. Another crucial aspect of this is unifying data between teams and platforms, facilitating the flow of information across channels to ensure that interactions with customers are not interrupted when activities change from, for example, making a sales inquiry to address. a product problem.
Going omnichannel pays off not only because it increases customer satisfaction, but it can also lead to higher revenue. The world’s leading banks derive 50% of their sales from digital channels, demonstrating the importance of digitization for success in the financial sector.
Digital integrations
An omnichannel experience is not possible without integration. All platforms used to interact with customers and manage their data and transactions must be linked to ensure the smoothest workflow and the highest quality service. The key here is to connect the digital applications used to serve financial consumers with physical bank locations and customer communication platforms.
Digital integrations have been implemented in the financial services sector, but only a minority of customers (16%) are satisfied with the digital experience provided by their banks. The problem here is, again, that customer data is not shared across segments of the organization. Each team may be performing well on its own, but the rigidity of operations affects the overall customer experience.
The solution to this is to facilitate the flow of information through digital integrations. Various software and applications are now capable of integrating disparate systems, allowing finance companies to mix software vendors if they choose. For example, a CTI solution like the Salesforce Cisco phone integration connects voice communication tools to computers, streamlining many sales and customer support tasks. There are also specific applications that aim to synchronize chat channels or even emails with local banking software.
Infusing CX with new financial technologies
With AI and more mobile technology, there are more opportunities to personalize CX and make it more enjoyable, enjoyable, and secure for consumers.
Some technologies that financial services companies can explore are:
Biometric-based customer identification – Banks and finance companies can now choose to use biometric technology instead of the username and password combination for customer login and verification in their systems. There are several options available, such as fingerprint, iris, retina, and voice recognition. In addition to being more secure, these technologies are more efficient and easier for consumers to use.
Robotic Advisors – Similar to chatbots, these virtual advisers are powered by machine learning and are viable substitutes for human investment managers. They are often used to analyze risk and assist consumers in portfolio management.
Internet of Things – With the Internet literally connecting everything, financial transactions will become more fluid and mobile. Checking your account on your wearable? Or while driving? You can do all of that with IoT.
Banking as a service
Tech companies are leading the way in digital banking experiences, and banks and other traditional financial institutions would do better to learn from them. They could emulate them and build their own, or they could be smarter about it and do it in the fastest way, that is, partner with companies that offer BaaS and BaaP.
Banks working with API and BaaS will result in concrete changes in the way individual consumers and business customers do their banking.
For consumers, an advantage would be that all accounts can be accessed through one app, making transactions easier. The management of these individual accounts can also be done on any device because the data would be stored in the cloud. Individuals will also receive personalized advice regarding portfolio, stocks, and other financial products.
B2B customers benefit even more as the digitization of finance translates into savings in infrastructure and administrative costs.
Partnering with new digital platforms will allow banks to catch up and offer customers an elegant mobile experience that has become the norm in the digital age. This may cost a bit of investment, but it will definitely pay off in the long run.
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Financial service providers have to decisively shift gears before losing touch with their customers and falling behind in the digital age. These trends and technologies are destined to usher in a new era of financial services, one that is more adept at serving mobile and digitally savvy customers. However, that doesn’t mean that banks and finance companies can do without their customer service lines and human agents.
To cultivate long-term productive relationships with customers, you need to cover all the bases, from digital to non-digital touch points. Phone calls, live conversations, and customer meetings still have a huge impact on the overall CX, especially since these interactions involve human representatives from the business. Ultimately, digital experiences serve as a continuity of the personal connection that financial companies establish with their clients.