In my last blog, we discussed the importance of creating superior customer experience to drive growth in financial services.
Creating superior experiences can often feel like a Sisyphean task because customer expectations are constantly rising, while simultaneously customer willingness to forgive poor service is decreasing. The contact center is often the touchpoint that defines the first impression of the financial institution and therefore plays a critical role in the lasting impression customers have.
Recent research suggests that 55 billion agent-assisted contacts are handled in U.S. contact centers, annually.1
Here is some of the data I found describing the importance of those interactions:
- 37%of consumers who ended a business relationship did so because they were frustrated with the IVR (interactive voice response).2
- 47% of customers would take their business to a competitor within a day of experiencing poor customer service, and 79% would do the same within a week.3
What Your Customers Want
With so much riding on the contact center experience, what exactly is it that customers are seeking? 86% of consumers describe a great customer service experience as one of the following: the company anticipates their needs; the self-service is optimal and they're able to contact the company any way they want.4
Clearly, financial institutions must focus on more efficient processing to achieve the experience customers demand, while ensuring compliance in the ever-evolving regulatory landscape. The contact center must be able to integrate legacy processes and documents, along with IVR and other technologies. It must be flexible enough to ingest complex processing rules, and integrate information across systems to create a unified, 360-degree view of the customer including transaction history, and complaint history.
Empower Your Customer Services Representatives
The contact center agent must be empowered to truly help the customer with the ability to initiate account level changes, change fees and handle exception resolution. The importance of the employee experience cannot be overlooked when engaged customers connect with engaged employees, companies experience a 240% boost in performance-related business outcomes.5
Exactly what are some of the performance-related business outcomes that financial institutions should focus on as they look toward automating the contact center?
To increase customer satisfaction and enhance experience, financial institutions will certainly want to focus on reducing average handle time (AHT) and hold time, they will strive to address customer requests on the first call and decrease the number of tier 2 escalations. This requires automating manual processes to provide tight controls and visibility, while delivering effective reporting to feed continued process improvement. But, perhaps the most important is a dedication to enhancing the employee experience. This starts by reducing the number of systems employees need to learn and access.
How is Appian helping our financial services customers achieve the superior experience their customers demand? Watch this video to see an example of just one of the many customers that Appian has partnered with to drive their digital transformation.
Learn More at Appian World
To hear more, make sure you register for Appian World 2018.There you'll meet many of our customers in financial services and they can tell you how the Appian low-code development platform provides the intelligent automation with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and case management that helps them achieve digital transformation success. We hope to see you in Miami this April.
Sources:
2https://info.247.ai/WS-NA-CE-Index-WS.html
3,4https://info.247.ai/WS-NA-CE-Index-WS.html
