Financial Services Contact Centers: Intraday Automation Puts Your Customers First

Today’s financial services contact centers face many challenges when it comes to delivering an exceptional customer experience.

In addition to dealing with a portfolio of highly regulated products, there are generational chasms with varying expectations, demands and tolerance level across multiple channels.

Additionally, the industry is facing technological updates. In a recent survey, 53% of 198 global bankers said they expect that regulators will soon force banks to update their legacy systems.

As a result of all of these multidimensional challenges, the financial services industry is making investments in three primary areas: channel, customer service and experience, and process.

Today’s customers are dynamic. Now more than ever, they are becoming increasingly demanding and they expect exceptional service.

While customer expectations have increased, the contact center workforce – and approach to workforce management – has been static for many years.

Many workforce management processes are manual, with siloed delivery services. The result is a customer service gap between growing customer expectations and the ability to meet those expectations. In essence, customers have become too dynamic for the rigid frontlines that continue to exist.

The real question is how big will you allow the gap to get?

In today’s world, contact centers do everything they can to prepare for the unknown. But no matter how much you prepare, when the situation unexpectedly changes – through surprise marketing promotions, channel overload, product issues, socio-economic concerns, or unexpected staffing adherence and avoidance – you still have to react.

Fail to react fast enough and you most assuredly risk a negative impact on the customer experience.

It’s a common problem. In fact, a survey conducted earlier this year showed that 45% of customers can’t remember having a recent successful customer experience.

What’s driving that 45%?

Imagine a customer picks up the phone to call in for service. Unbeknownst to them, you’re experiencing an increase in call volume or dealing with staff absenteeism. When they can’t get their issue handled in a reasonable amount of time, it’s likely that the customer will become frustrated.

(In fact, of the 45% who said they can’t remember a positive customer experience, 35% cited experiencing poor response times as the reason for their negative experience.)

Then, once they finally get through, do your agents have the training and skills they need to handle the customer’s issue? If not, then the customer’s frustration continues to grow.

(Again, of the 45%, three out of 10 reported the employee that they connected with were poorly trained.)

Inevitably either the call is escalated, transferred, or worse, the customer ends up calling back in for resolution.

With all of the issues surrounding self-service and the infrastructure required to run frontline operations, contact centers are faced with an almost impossible situation.

But what if you could design business rules that run constantly in the background, and when conditions occur that you did not forecast or plan for, like spikes in call volumes or a specific call type, or a spike in absenteeism; these “triggers” would cause the business rules to automatically realign the appropriate resources to immediately meet the new level of demand. Then the process is completed by automatically making the necessary adjustments that are typically handled manually.

It is the contact center’s “hi-tech” answer to your “hi-tech” customers.

With intraday automation, that’s exactly what happens.

Intraday automation technology gathers data from your existing systems and – based on business rules you have written – triggers real time actions that impact your frontline.

As a result, an agile, real-time frontline workforce is created transforming service delivery, while increasing productivity and reducing costs as a result of manual processes being eliminated. With intraday automation, you are never unprepared for the unexpected.

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