Go BackRetail banks need to offer a personalised customer service to stand apart from the competition
A report from Datamonitor states that with larger financial services firms come broader product portfolios. Therefore synergies and organic growth depend on generating sales across different product types - i.e. up- and cross-selling to existing customers - and establishing high customer loyalty levels. The call centre is one medium through which financial service organisations can achieve this. The challenge however, is to have well-trained agents with access to all the necessary information of the client on the phone, as well as the products and services which the company can offer them.
Yet, many financial services firms are left with numerous, disparate call centres, often operating across multiple technology platforms in different geographies servicing different client sets. So balancing improved customer service on the one hand, with cost efficiency on the other, without requiring risky and expensive application re-engineering or replacement projects, is an efficiency issue that financial service organisations must consider.
David Holmes, Vice President at Jacada, shows how a unified desktop approach can enhance the productivity of contact centre agents by simplifying complex processes and providing them with a 'single view' of the customer for faster, more effective customer interactions.
Until recently, the contact centre was treated as a cost centre - a necessary overhead needed to complete customer service transactions, but not something worthy of significant investment. To establish how efficient the contact centre was, managers would focus on productivity levels - but these basic measurements did little to support effectiveness. Staff weren't motivated, which lead to high staff turnover and replacement costs; and customers weren't satisfied at being dealt with as a call handling statistic, resulting in high customer churn.
Customers must feel valued when they interact with a business. An agent must quickly identify who they are, retrieve their customer profile, and then use that information effectively to resolve the enquiry.
Yet this is made difficult for some agents who have to navigate multiple screens (up to 14 in some cases) to answer a customer query and use copy-and-paste to move information between the different applications. As a process, this is time-consuming and can lead to re-keying errors.
Addressing contact centre complexity
Efforts to improve operational efficiency in the contact centre are severely hampered by the complexity of the agent's working environment. In order to help agents become more effective, retail banks need to look at simplifying their core processes and deliver an enterprise-level view of a customer across multiple systems and customer records.
Automating and streamlining the first part of a call - identification and verification (ID & V) - helps free up an agent's time to deal with the enquiry itself - where the real value lies. However, it is important that the information gathered at the beginning of the interaction is translated to the agent's desktop as it justifies the ID & V process by eliminating duplicated activity and supports the agent, delivering a joined-up service for the customer.
This is where a unified desktop approach comes in: it provides contact centre agents with a single view of the customer to ensure they have all the relevant information at the right time. Agents can then optimise the critical part of a call - when the agent actually engages with the customer. It helps ensure that a customer's enquiry is resolved first time, resulting in happy, satisfied customers.
A unified desktop simplifies processes so agents can spend more time working with the customer rather than getting distracted by complex internal processes. This is not only good for the agents, in terms of their ability to establish a meaningful relationship, it also helps to re-emphasise and personalise brand identity within the contact centre.
Agents have to know who the customer is when they ring in, and have instant access to all their previous interactions with the organisation, so the service they receive can be tailored to their specific requirements. What typically happens is: the customer calls up, is immediately placed in an auto-queue for two to three minutes, and is then routed through to the first available agent where they have to start all over again.
So for example, knowing that when Miss Jones, aged 60, calls to pay her credit card balance, she has also applied for a car loan, means that you don't waste time offering her a secondary user card but rather offer her car insurance. This level of customer service is possible when the agent is presented with the right information made easily-accessible on his desktop.
With increasing operational consolidation of financial services organisations, it's quite likely that a customer might deal with one company for many services - for example banking, credit, loans, mortgages and insurance. The customer needs to have a seamless service experience across all of these areas if they are to continue using them.
The value of agent satisfaction
Retail banks have to recognise and remember that one of the keys to a successful contact centre is staff who are happy in their working environment. Gartner has shown that a 2 per cent rise in agent satisfaction will result in a 1 per cent rise in customer satisfaction and one of the most critical aspects of this is offering agents a more flexible and varied role. A unified desktop gives them the tools to effectively deal with customers, and eliminates monotonous processes making their role more fulfilling.
