Regulatory compliance is always top-of-mind for financial services organizations and critical for sustainable business. Non-compliance and a lack of knowledge of the latest rules and procedures can result in penalties and increased scrutiny by regulators, but these issues also can have a dramatic negative influence on customer satisfaction and the ability to attract and keep your customer base. Customer agents in financial services contact centers are put in an especially precarious position of providing a superior customer experience on a minute-by-minute basis while staying current with the information they provide.

Speed and accuracy are in constant flux in the financial services contact center. Training and communication are a must, but these centers face the dilemma of balancing shrinkage with service, and traditional ways of dealing with the issue can lead to increased labor costs required to meet the demands. Add to that the constant of internal audits and compliance, and the balance is even more tricky.

These institutions are constantly working to improve the customer experience while meeting operational requirements, juggling direct customer interactions with back office tasks and training. Statistics show that more than one-quarter of customers who contact service centers are dissatisfied because their issues were unresolved, often because the service rep didn’t have all the facts they needed or were not adequately prepared to address the concern at hand. Customers are even more dissatisfied by long wait times often brought on by shrinkage and high call volumes without adequate staffing.

Organizations are ill-equipped to manage these problems when they rely on outdated task and workforce management tools that silo agent training, coaching and offline operational needs. Frequently, well-meaning financial services organizations don’t take the time to look at their processes and procedures for how they balance customer service with how they prepare their agents to handle direct interactions.

That’s why Intradiem developed a 2-minute assessment geared specifically for the customer service centers of financial organizations. This 11-point checklist gets these orgs focused on how they plan and manage these tasks, including how to best utilize idle down time and channel balancing requirements so that these agents can react in real-time to at-hand interruptions and continue to meet compliance requirements. Use this assessment to ask yourself about your contact center operations:

• How do you adjust staffing to deal with business disruptions, such as increased call volume and foot traffic, and enable multi-channel service delivery?
• How do you make agents and associates aware of compliance communications and know when they read the alerts?
• How do you enable agents to complete compliance training and back office tasks without impacting service staffing or requiring additional staffing budget?

Our case study with Homeward Residential illustrates how Intradiem helped the mortgage services provider get a better handle on their compliance needs while maintaining service levels and staffing budget. Intradiem enables Homeward to balance agent training and show regulators that agents are prepared and able to deliver both compliance and a great customer experience.