By Graham Clark
Today’s consumers demand multiple methods for interacting with banks. Those banks with cutting-edge consumer-facing solutions have gained a competitive advantage in acquisition and retention, while late-adopter banks are struggling to catch up.
A true multichannel strategy requires more than just a website and a mobile app. Each channel needs to be optimized and managed to provide a seamless customer experience. Optimizing the multichannel experience requires a simultaneous focus on unlocking the value of digital investments and a dedication to re-inventing the customer experience.
Here are 10 critical areas to master for a successful multichannel banking strategy.
Personalize the Digital Experience
For the past 10 years, the banking and capital industry has focused on a customer-friendly, but inside-out “one bank” strategy, providing all products and services from one easily accessible branch, ATM, website or contact center. In digital, this is not enough. Wading through 62 products on a smartphone screen just doesn’t work for customers anymore. Individuals want to see only a few personalized products that are relevant and useful to them in the context of all their other banking and non-banking activities. Consumers want their banks to recommend what’s applicable to them (not best for the bank) and to interact with and message them when it’s to their advantage. Today’s customers want and expect a trusted partner and advisor, and this is achieved through personalization.
Improve the Physical Experience
Don’t neglect the value of the original banking channel: The in-person experience. Branch transaction volumes may be falling in volume, but they are more critical than ever. This requires more convenient hours, more intelligence, more local community atmosphere and more technology, including more advanced people-less banks or interactive ATMs and kiosks.
Tap Customer Experience Analytics
You can’t serve consumers unless you know them. Whether customers walk into a branch, call an agent, approach your website or use your mobile app, they expect you to understand their needs and serve them better. Use internal banking data and external data, such as transactions, social media profiles and shopping habits. Apply proven customer experience analytics to respond to each customer intimately, targeting specific products to each individual. And analyze your customer experience at an overall level with metrics like NPS, CES or CXi and at an individual interaction and channel level with tools like Fizzback, Foresee and customer sat scores.
Mobile Innovation is a Must
Just two years ago, consumers purchased 37 percent of their products online and 40 percent in a branch. Sixty percent of bill pay, balance/transaction views, statement views, and money transfers occurred via the web. With mobility interactions growing at the rate of more than 30 percent per year, mobility will transform your ability to sell and service individuals when, how and where they want. For many, the mobile banking experience is their only point of contact. You must invest in the mobile channel, above all.
Prioritize Payments and Transactions
Arguably the most important banking functions are payment and transaction processing interactions, whether merchant payments, credit card transactions, customer bill pay, trading stocks and moving funds – whether through cash, checks or online. Digital and mobile technologies are transforming payment expectations, capabilities and experiences. Make these functions seamless for consumers.
Enhance Self Service
Self-service capabilities, specifically voice-based interactive voice response systems (IVRs), continue to grow in sophistication and importance, aligning tightly with web service and other assisted and self-service capabilities. These need to be aligned with your digital capabilities.
Arm Your Contact Centers Agents
Voice agent interactions may be declining, but they’re more critical and complex than ever before. In an era of self-service and social media, customers rarely pick up the phone unless it’s an escalated concern. Contact center agents increasingly need to become specialists with added tools (SWATs), taking advantage of intelligent call routing based on customer profiles and behaviors; desktop tools that provide predictive recommendations based on previous actions, prompted to action by customer analytics and enabled to deliver improved experiences through speech analytics better knowledge applications; and collaborative chat, email and social messaging capabilities.
Increase Efficiency and Effectiveness
Supplement live agents with intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) to answer questions. IVAs remember every coaching moment, take no sick days, have zero attrition, work 24 hours a day and can handle hundreds or thousands of interactions at a time – all in the channel and language of the customer’s choice. Typically IVAs apply most easily in text-based interactions such as iChat, email or social media messaging. Interactive speech IVAs are emerging driven by customer expectations originating from the popularity of Siri and similar tools. Proven in many non-banking industries, IVAs often become the highest-ranked agents receiving repeated “agent of the month” awards from customers.
Get Social
Social media is increasingly important channel for sentiment and reputation analysis, market monitoring and promotion. And social is rapidly becoming necessary for targeted outbound messaging and connecting to communities. The real results don’t come from monitoring or understanding, but from acting on the insight. Do this by responding to and engaging with individual customers and building collaborative communities where customers help each other, and your bank.
Transition from a Multichannel to an Omnichannel Strategy
Focus on maximizing the customer experience across multiple channels using powerful operational tools, and transform your call center to a customer experience command center. Like NASA’s Mission Control, the customer experience command center uses advanced analytics to monitor and manage the customer experience across all channels, all media, all segments and all geographical locations to not only achieve targets, but predict the impact of actions on enterprise achievement.
Graham Clark is vice president and head of customer experience management for the industry solutions group at Mphasis.