The valuable role of a contact center at banking and financial institutions

Financial institutions have been the pioneers in the adoption of technology to service their clients and provide personalized customer experiences. Providing excellent customer service helps to build customer loyalty.

Since the pandemic began, customers have come to expect full service through the contact center without losing the personal touch that banks have traditionally provided in-person. Thankfully, contact center capabilities enable these expected experiences. Consider these few ways to ensure each client gets the best experience possible: 

• Reach clients on their preferred channels - A variety of digital channels are essential for connecting with your customers, including web chat, social media, and SMS. Some clients might prefer reaching out through a web chat to making a call. Omnichannel contact centers allow representatives to interact with customers through multiple channels on a single platform. Having increased ways to reach your organization will increase customer satisfaction since it makes it easier to get assistance when needed.
• Make it easy for clients to solve problems themselves - Before customers reach out to support representatives, empower them to handle basic inquiries and transaction activities themselves. Investing in self-service applications like chatbots and self-service IVRs will go a long way. Chatbots can provide 'always on' support at your customers' convenience 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Self-service IVRs can provide answers to FAQs regarding topics such as banking hours, bill payments, and account balances. Not only do self-service applications resolve issues quickly, but it is cheaper to have customers self-serve than to speak with a live agent. By implementing self-service, customer representatives are freed from routine tasks and can focus on upselling and complex non-routine inquiries.
• Personalize experiences for each client - Customers often appreciate personalized experiences. With a CRM integration, representatives can access comprehensive client profiles to provide personalized advice. This advice may be based on previous behaviour, recent transactions, open and closed tickets, and customer communication preferences. The contact center in a financial institution may be typically seen as a channel for transaction completion, but it does not have to be. Providing customized recommendations for the next steps in customers’ financial goals serves as a way to establish lasting relationships.
• Listen to your clients’ feedback - Listen to your customers' feedback and improve their experiences by better understanding their needs. With multimedia surveys, you can receive feedback on your services to enhance customer experiences and improve business operations through benchmarking satisfaction levels. Banks and financial organizations can identify service gaps and discover growth opportunities to enhance the overall service by acknowledging customers' pain points.
• Allow clients to get in touch with the right representative - Put high-touch customers, members, or urgent cases at the front of the queue when calling into your organization. Creating and modifying interaction workflows across multiple communication channels allows organizations to make configuration changes for high-priority clients. Routing clients to the right service channel and representatives reduces the number of unnecessary transfers and improves customer satisfaction.
• Give clients peace of mind with credit card security - A customer relationship requires trust, and it's particularly important in financial institutions since sensitive data is involved. Thankfully, clients will not have to worry about sharing their credit card numbers over the phone when making payments. Contact centers that process payment using PCI-compliant IVR-based cloud services never store any sensitive cardholder data in your environment for both self-service and agent-assisted inquiries.

Contact centers play a huge role in facilitating excellent customer service at financial service organizations. By using modern applications, banks and financial institutions will provide excellent service to their clients and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty to their organization.

For information on how to make the most of your contact center during the COVID-19 pandemic, check out ComputerTalk's past blog or sign up for our newsletter!