Customers have changed in many ways. For example, they prefer to find information by themselves rather than wait for a company to respond to their phone call or email, especially if it is routine information. 88% of consumers today expect brands to offer self-service in the contact center, and 81% will try to solve their problems themselves before going to a company.
Chatbots, virtual assistants, and other technologies have made easier the way customers solve their problems easily and quickly at any time of the day. At the same time, the agents’ workload decreases, as they would now oversee the most complex user problems.
For consumers, finding self-service at their bank means spending less time doing transactions and more free time interacting with new financial products and services. In today’s world, and even more so in the new post-COVID era, providing these types of solutions in an agile manner is a must for the banking industry.
Now, we will share with you 3 points that will serve as a guide for implementing an efficient self-service experience.
1. Be clear about the characteristics that self-service should have
Consumers appreciate that you implement measures focused on their needs. However, they require that these implementations work. In this case, there are two crucial characteristics that any self-service solution must have to serve its customers:
– Convenience:
It must solve real and frequent problems. For example, your bank’s customer wants to check his available balance, cancel a credit card, apply for a loan, ask questions about products, etc. In other words, all those queries and difficulties that may arise in your customer’s journey must be able to result by themselves through the self-service tools in your Contact Center.
– Speed:
Your customers must feel they are in control of the process and can immediately find the answer to their query, without having to wait for your company to contact them.
In addition, you must show them that you value their time. It means they don’t have to stop doing daily tasks to make a call or send an email to your company. They must be able to access information through Self-Service 24 hours a day, through any device connected to the Internet.
This will be helpful to your company’s operations, as the more people using self-service, the more agent resources are freed up to help consumers when they have more complex queries that require human involvement, thus reducing wait times for these interactions.
2. Identify the right tools for self-service
The first step that financial institutions must take to adapt to Digital Banking and self-service is to have a Contact Center that has sufficient capacity to serve all their customers. Omnichannel is the key to providing a service that meets the transactional needs of customers, with a homogeneous experience throughout their journey.
Omni-channel banking doesn’t eliminate the need to call a customer service agent, but rather enables self-service channels so that the customer can intuitively resolve their request, regardless of the medium.
It is essential that you can provide an omnichannel service integrating multiple contact platforms. For example, the key factor in Enghouse solutions is that they perfectly recognize your customers and their relationship with your organization, regardless of the channel they use.
It allows you to always maintain the context of each interaction, facilitating seamless and personalized communication. This feature is essential if we follow the “2020 Customer Expectations Report” prepared by Gladly, which indicates that 79% of people preferred personalized attention to specialized marketing. 86% percent expect conversations with agents to run smoothly across channels.
In addition, an omnichannel strategy helps you increase up-selling, thanks to analytics and knowledge of user behavior. It is based on their choices as they interact across channels.
– Tools that your omnichannel Contact Center solution must have:
Social networks:
Establish or strengthen communication with your customers through different digital and social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, or Whatsapp, allowing you to improve their experience, reduce costs and time required in telephone attention and increase revenue with better use of human resources.
Likewise, it combines social media management with a workflow that integrates all communications into one knowledge base and ensures that personalized and standard responses reach the customer.
When the bank’s customers need to get in touch with the company, the interaction is moved to the most appropriate available agent via chat in the Contact Center platform, allowing the agent to have access to the user’s conversation history and context for a better understanding and more efficient interaction.
Chatbot + AI:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the basis of chatbots, intelligent machines that can perform various automated customer service tasks. It is based on understanding a query and getting the right information or performing a basic task.
By implementing this technology, you free your customers to ask questions in their own words. Use linguistic technology to understand their meaning and match questions to answers in their knowledge base.
IVR (Interactive Voice Response):
IVR solutions are used to guide your customers through simple, repetitive tasks to provide round-the-clock service.
Your customers will be able to process routine transactions through voice recognition, touch-tone, or a few clicks in the application.
Intelligent IVR systems are easy to build, deploy and iterate. They intuitively guide customers through the fastest route to find what they need.
3. Measure… always measure results and identify opportunities for improvement.
Everything that can be measured generates opportunities for improvement. Nowadays, it is a ‘must’ to have tools that provide data on the company’s operation. In your Contact Center software, you must have several tools that will help you with this task:
– Quality Management Suite:
Allows the overview (calls, texts, or data) of each interaction that the customer makes with the Contact Center, in such a way that allows you to analyze each of them and ensure the quality of operations. Videos with synchronized voice and screen capture can be exported and viewed using a web browser-based media player.
– Satisfaction surveys:
There is no better way to know what your customers think or want than by asking them themselves. In addition, our system also helps you define what kind of surveys you should conduct with each user.
– Business Intelligence:
Compiles all the information in an interactive and visual dashboard, which allows you to know and predict your customer’s behavior, facilitating decision making and increasing business opportunities.
Finally, keep in mind that…
Making self-service available to customers brings several competitive advantages for banks, and it will be a better customer experience and loyalty to the brand.
The first one is the improvement in the customer experience. But there are also benefits such as the reduction of call center service volume and, mainly, the reduction of support costs. Enabling self-service will result in capturing thousands of opportunities to interact more deeply with customers.
