How Do You Get Your Contact Center Ready for New-Age Retail Banking Needs?

According to Deloitte, banking customers are less satisfied with contact center experiences than with online banking or branch services. These lower customer satisfaction levels may force customers to look for alternate solutions.

Banks have invested in digital experiences that are paying dividends for them. However, they have substantial unrealized opportunities at the contact center.

Importance of Digital Transformation in Banking

Let me give you a few scenarios.

Scenario 1

Imagine I call up the bank’s call center to inquire about a product, and I am put on hold for 12 minutes before I get connected to a human being. Only 1 in 10 would likely hold on for such a long time, and the rest would have moved on.

Scenario 2

Let us say I do an online transaction to transfer a sum of money. The amount gets debited from my account, but the payee hasn’t received it. I email the bank about it, and I get a canned response with a ticket number with an SLA of 72 hours. I am stuck as I don’t have additional money to do another transaction, and the payee is stuck as he wanted the payment urgently.

Scenario 3

I have reward points to redeem on my credit card. The statement tells me that I can redeem them by logging into my Internet banking account. I don’t remember my username and password. So, I call the call center to redeem my reward points, and the agent tells me that I should log in to Internet banking to redeem. When I mention that I don’t remember the username and password, the agent suggests that I write a letter and submit it at any physical branch, and they would activate my Internet banking. Two years have passed, and I still haven’t redeemed my reward points.

Scenario 4

I have availed of a term loan for 15 years against collateral. I have paid them for 11 years, and I am looking for a top-up loan against the same collateral. I write to the bank, and I don’t receive any response. I call up my engagement executive, and I am told that he has to check and get back to me. It takes another seven days before I get a response from the executive. There is every likelihood that this customer is lured away by the bank’s competitors.

All of these are unrealized opportunities for the bank. They could have delighted their customers and improved their customer loyalty and lifetime value manifold with just a little extra.

What Has Prevented the Executives From Providing the Best Service?

Often, the customer service executives do not have access to the right information. This has got to do with both technology and process.

Let me explain how technology combined with the process could have helped realize the opportunities in each of these scenarios.

Scenario 1

Provide the customer with an automated IVR option to choose the product they were trying to inquire about. Once that is done, routing it to the product guys would have been easier, and the bank could have done this within a minute. 

Scenario 2

Reassure the customer about the process of the transaction. Provide the customer with the reference number, which they can share with the payee, and the payee’s bank can trace and credit the money immediately.

The agents need access to the transaction system to pull out the transaction number.

Scenario 3

The agent can verify the customer’s credentials with a few valid questions. They can even share an OTP on their registered mobile number and ask them to read it out for verification. The agent can then share the username along with a link for them to reset their password.

The entire process can be done within minutes and keep your customers loyal. You need to have your internal systems integrated with your contact center platform for the agent to perform this function effortlessly. 

Scenario 4

As a bank, you should always know the customer’s eligibility for a top-up, which can be subject to approval. So, the moment the customer calls you, you should be able to tell them that they can avail themselves of so much more as the top-up loan.

The loan systems would have this feature. However, access to those loan systems may not be available to the agents. Hence, make sure that those systems are also integrated. Alternately, guide them through the IVR to the loan department directly, where the agents would have access to it immediately.

This way, the customer will have the information that they need immediately. To learn more about how ClearTouch’s tools can be customized for you, Request a Demo today.

In all of these scenarios, the common thread is to have a single view of the customer and have all systems integrated to offer the best possible customer service to the customers.

In retail banking, every interaction with the customer is an opportunity to increase the customer’s lifetime value. So, it makes sense to equip your customer-facing executives with all the tools and the necessary information.