Some 90% of financial services leaders agree that delivering better customer experience (CX) drives significant financial returns for their organization. Arguably, it is in the contact center where the connection between CX and financial impact is most apparent.
Typically, contact centers are hugely expensive for financial institutions to run. Relatively simple customer issues such as paying a bill might cost a few dollars per call, measured in employee time. More complex issues such as changing an account from joint to sole can cost significantly more. A complaint will cost most institutions hundreds of dollars to resolve on account of the more laborious processes associated with complaint handling.
When multiplied across hundreds of thousands of calls per annum, that sums to a very significant number. According to Microsoft Dynamics, 86% of financial institutions assign 25% or more of their overall budget to customer service – with 45% of institutions assigning roughly 50% or more.
Better CX is critical for managing down the costs associated with running contact centers, but how are financial institutions making that happen?
Better customer containment
Very little customer feedback that surfaces in contact centers relates to the employee who assisted the customer. The majority of feedback relates to breakdowns in other channels upstream, like digital. When customers encounter a problem and are unable to complete their task online, the first thing many of them do is call customer support.
Consequently, the first line of defense in taking out the cost of call center operations should be to eliminate friction from digital conversion funnels. Empowering more customers to complete their task via self-service will divert a sizable portion of the unhealthy traffic that otherwise ends up in contact centers.
In the case of one full-service bank headquartered in the Asia-Pacific, improving the signposting in its online credit card application drove up customer journey completion by 49%, avoiding significant traffic to the contact center. Meanwhile, in the case of a major Canadian bank, when call volumes increased massively during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the bank embedded digital feedback forms on its website, to enable customers to select what they wanted to do and direct them to the right webpage. Within the first two weeks, they were able to help 100,000 customers online, deflecting $750,000 worth of calls.
Automating manual processes
Highly manual processes that restrict operational efficiency push significant cost into contact centers.
For example, organizations typically rely on post-call work to understand why people are calling, by having customer service representatives (CSRs) manually assign calls from a menu of possible options, otherwise known as dispositioning. Not only does this take time, thereby reducing capacity to handle incoming calls, but it is also subjective. A common complaint is that time-constrained CSRs often pick the “catch-all” option – or even just the first item in the list – meaning that calls are frequently dispositioned incorrectly as a result.
Many firms augment this with post-call surveys, in which they ask customers to confirm their reasons for calling – but response rates are falling, and typically range from just 5-15% in financial services today. Poor call dispositioning leads to an incorrect understanding of friction points that contribute to repeat calls and customer attrition. In turn, contact centers are not resourced to deal effectively with customer pain.
There are further manual processes associated with quality assurance and quality management (QA/QM). Typically, QA/QM officers will listen to a handful of calls per CSR per month, and then manually populate a scorecard. Again, not only is this time consuming, but it also contributes to a faulty understanding – a sample of less than 1% does not paint an accurate picture.
Leading financial institutions are starting to automate these processes. By harnessing the power of AI to analyze voice calls, as well as transcripts from calls and chat, firms are able to achieve the stacked wins of significantly reduced operational inefficiency while simultaneously expanding their understanding to 100% of customers.
A great example comes from American Express. The company has historically seen a great response from its post-call surveys, but it is now starting to unlock the potential of unstructured data for a richer understanding of omnichannel experiences. As American Express’s VP of Customer Voice, Luis Angel-Lalanne, says:
“How do we learn from every interaction? Not just the ones we get a survey response back on. That feels like an enormous untapped potential ... The ability to take that to almost 100% [of interactions], that's going to be really powerful. And will allow us to start to do an even better job of connecting experience metrics to all the other metrics the organization cares about”.
CSR engagement at risk
Finally, particularly during economic downturns, CSRs are at the forefront of customer dissatisfaction and demand – which can have a highly negative impact on employee engagement. Exacerbating this, many institutions continue to operate a hybrid model, where working from home remains a factor. Despite the wellbeing and lifestyle advantages that it can afford, this environment also contributes to CSRs receiving less consistent feedback, as managers are less able to walk over to a team member’s desk and provide real-time coaching.
In a world where 36% of customers are unhappy with the empathy they received from a CSR, we see how employee disengagement leads to less effective CX. Meanwhile, engaged employees are more customer-centric, yielding happier customers and repeat purchasers.
Leaders in financial services understand the need to prioritize employee experience (EX) as part of their experience strategies. When Goldman Sachs asked employees what benefits they valued most, it turned out they wanted more support for their families and life outside work, rather than more traditional benefits around financial wellness and retirement. Working with Qualtrics, Goldman was able to determine how employees valued different possible combinations of benefit options, which led to rolling out benefits around family care, fertility, adoption, and a new paternity policy that was lauded in the press as “the most generous parental leave policy on Wall Street.”
The next step is harnessing unstructured data to better understand employee emotions and training needs. By leveraging AI-powered theme discovery to analyze calls and chat transcripts, leaders in financial services are starting to identify coaching opportunities for CSRs to help them deliver better experiences. And first-movers are already thinking about improving productivity with purpose built, frontline tools to assist CSRs on calls in real-time.
From cost center to competitive advantage
Cost control does not inevitably harm CX – far from it. Indeed, good CX and EX are more than just the right thing to do: both have the potential to drive meaningful business benefits. By deploying some of these best practices in their contact centers, financial institutions are simultaneously taking costs out of their operations, while driving greater employee engagement and customer loyalty alike.
How are you addressing the employee experience in your contact center operations, especially during the remote work era?
