What Should You Be Aware of While Transforming Your Banking Contact Center to Digital-First?

Recently, I presented the keynote address at one of the BPO conferences. After my speech, one person from the audience approached me and congratulated me on the presentation. After that, he said that as a Banking organization, they are looking at implementing digital-first contact centers to enhance their customer experience (CX).

I was thrilled to hear this. I continued the conversation by asking him about the steps they are taking toward making it digital-first.

He mentioned the initiatives that they have undertaken, and they are:

1. They have self-service options on their website and a chatbot for transactional queries
2. They have re-configured the IVR to include the most often asked queries of the customers as the menu option
3. They created FAQs of most frequently asked questions that were readily available, along with self-help videos on getting the answers to their queries
4. They have deployed agents to listen to and address queries and complaints on their social channels

Once I heard this, I was impressed. There was a lot of learning for me in this conversation, and I started probing how they arrived at these possibilities and prioritized them.

Then I asked him the most important question.

How Did They Integrate All of These Channels?

That’s when he said they all exist in silos, with special agents assigned to address queries on each channel.

So, I suggested that these initiatives are good, and they can become great if they are all integrated, providing a single view of the customer. More so in a banking environment.

Then, I further shared with him the little knowledge I have about implementing omnichannel customer experiences.

Omnichannel Customer Experiences

Banks cannot afford to offer anything less than superior CX.

According to Forrester’s Customer Experience index, research shows that when a company makes customers feel appreciated, 76% will keep their business with the brand, while 80% will spend more with the brand, and 87% will recommend the brand to friends and family.

It also reveals that omnichannel customer engagement is preferred by almost 78% of customers.

Few home truths

• Modern customers in a BFSI environment do not want to visit a branch to do their transactions but prefer an omnichannel engagement over the channels of their choice.

• Any transition from a traditional contact center to a digital-first contact center should be on one platform – allowing them to deep dive into the customer interactions and provide the best possible customer experience.

• As a BFSI player, you should be able to digitize the entire customer relationship lifecycle and provide a 360-degree view of their customers with omnichannel orchestration and powerful analytics.

Let us look at a scenario:

A customer chats with your website chatbot and is not able to reach a resolution. The customer is provided with the option on the chatbot to seamlessly talk to a live human agent at the call center.

The agent views the conversation that the customer has had with the chatbot. He pulls the information the customer is asking for from the backend and resolves the queries.

Now, he transitions the call to another department to process the approval of a transactional query that the customer had. This also happens seamlessly, and the approver accesses all the chat and telephonic conversations and goes ahead with the approval.

In this scenario, if you notice, the customer did not have to repeat himself even once. He did not have to make the efforts to reach specific departments by himself – it was all automated. The transition from one channel to another and between departments was seamless, focusing on providing the best possible customer experience.

This would also allow the contact center agents to work more productively to ensure more complex inquiries get the support, quality, and time they deserve.

Today’s banking customer’s journey can be complex, spanning many different contact points across various engagement channels.

Most often than not, communication remains siloed, with no single view of the customer. It is very important that banks move towards a digital-first approach with an omnichannel experience and a single view of the customers across channels. This would allow them to provide the best possible CX that today’s customers have come to expect.

CX in the banking industry has already evolved as the key competitive differentiator. It would make a lot of sense to focus on that to keep yourself ahead of your competition.