COVID-19 has impacted financial services on both the customer side and the service side. Stressed customers are reaching out to their banks for help in record numbers and with unprecedented urgency. Increasingly, they’re reaching out through virtual/digital channels (mobile apps, online, and call centers). No matter how they reach out, customers want answers to their questions and expect their needs to be met.
Financial services providers have simultaneously seen their employees impacted. Call centers have increasingly distributed customer call volume to employees working from home.
Amidst CX and EX Challenges, Agility Matters
What’s most important in times of change is organizational agility: the capacity to redeploy your people, technology and processes in a timely, as-needed manner. Neither customers nor employees expect financial services to go back to some pre-COVID-19 “normalcy.” Savvy financial service providers are thinking ahead and proactively addressing today’s accelerating digital adoption.
If you’re not proactive in meeting the evolving needs and circumstances of your customers and employees, churn will result. Customers want seamless, consistently-reliable service across all channels. Being flat-footed about your CX will not only result in dissatisfied customers, but inundated employees who struggle to deliver quality service.
4 Steps to Success Across Service Channels
A “digital-first approach” is paramount for financial service providers confronting the double-whammy COVID-19 has imposed upon customers and employees. How can you drive an effective, “digital first approach”?
Step 1: Centralize your knowledge base
Financial service providers have vast amounts of intangible knowledge assets, such as answers to FAQs, product and customer information, and more. Customers and employees need to access this knowledge, especially in a crisis. “Knowledge base management” is about organizing and maintaining this relevant information into a centralized knowledge base for customers and agents to access and utilize at scale across channels.
Step 2: Enable self-service tools
Many customers today seek out self-service options for quick interactions with companies. Self-service tools like conversational chatbots can handle repetitive, simple requests (like FAQs) and also manage simple transactions, reducing workloads on your human reps, who are liberated to handle higher-level tasks. Distributing traffic enables better results for CX (higher customer satisfaction rates) and EX (less workload and more engaged, productive employees).
Step 3: Blend self-service tools and reps
Blending human reps and self-service tools optimizes workflow and enables each resource to do what it does best. If a self-service tool can’t deliver on what the customer wants, seamless, instant escalation happens, as all contextual information gets shared with the rep (who can pick up where the self-service tool left off). Chatbots can also function as "virtual assistants" following along with the customer-to-rep escalation and providing support to the rep.
Step 4: Standardize omnichannel experiences
Financial services must be delivered seamlessly and effectively across multiple service channels, under an integrated “omnichannel strategy.” Customers see financial service providers as a single, unified entity, and justifiably so. Whether they access service via the branch, ATM, mobile app, online, via the call center or any other service channel, they expect providers to know their information, understand their needs, and meet them. When the CX is different across channels, customers are rightfully frustrated and may look elsewhere (churn).
Conclusion
The “new normal” is here to stay. Financial services providers will need to distribute seamless service across channels, deploying an integrated knowledge base as customers increasingly turn to digital. The four steps described above will help you retain and better engage customers and employees as this uncertain time.