By Warren Newbert, CEO of Infinity

In the post covid era, finance customer demands are changing. To meet those needs, financial services institutions need to make the customer experience the starting point for process design.

They are two trends are dominating the effectiveness customer experience delivered by financial services – the first being the rise of agile new market players, which is increasing competition and disrupting traditional banking. The second is the increased use of digital channels, with more and more customers moving away from face-to-face and telephone interactions, a trend fast-tracked by the pandemic.

However, this trend seemed great in theory, but many interactions within financial services are complex – and customers still want the reassurance of speaking to a human where money is concerned. That means that digital channels can never replace those personalised telephone interactions that many customers still crave.  Investing in personalisation empowers financial services to deliver the service that customers are looking for in 2022. The majority 72% of customers say that personalisation is important in financial services today.

Why phone calls are still necessary for good customer experiences in 2022?

Customers and brands alike are moving towards digital as their preferred customer service experience. However, phone calls to financial services still represent many contact points that the brand will have with its users.

Customers care a lot about the safety of their money, and if one of them is calling their bank, it’s doing with a serious issue. Stress levels can be high, so financial services need to ensure that their customer service team is well prepared to offer excellent help.

Despite this, trying to make a phone enquiry to a bank is often a challenge. It can frustrate customers to get bounced around by an automated voice. Especially if you’re calling with an enquiry that requires more nuance than what their deflected call channels seem to offer.

Important experiences

Having a good customer service experience with a financial services institution can make or break a customer’s trust in that business. If a customer requires vital information, a slow or ineffectual response from the agent who takes their call can damage that brand’s reputation.

Most incoming phone calls will be from customers with questions about what is happening with, or to, their finances- and the number of these requests can overwhelm the phone lines of the organisation daily.

Customer service managers have a tough task at hand. Each phone call is important for both the customer and the brand, and the user could require urgent information on a wide variety of issues. Prepping each agent to be ready for whatever query comes up is difficult and requires a diligent plan of action based on real-time data.

Customer struggling during the recession

Talks of a recession in the UK have been ramping up in the past few weeks, and there is a lack of communication from the UK government on how they are going to tackle the ongoing financial crisis. Even today, questions surrounding the safety of pensions are being raised. Mortgage payments are at risk of skyrocketing by hundreds of pounds a month, and homeowners in the UK must make long-term plans to combat the increased rates.

The financial crisis in the UK is a dark cloud at the forefront of the general population’s mind, and their valid concerns about their pensions and mortgages are directed towards their chosen supplier of financial services.  Each of these concerned calls causes careful, effective and intelligent service from customer service agents across all FSIs.

Recession CX 101: How to prepare your CX agents.

The effectiveness of call analytics to overcome challenges from the financial crisis in the UK

There are three fundamental problems that customer experience managers for FSIs need to solve.

1: Each call represents a critical opportunity to establish their brand as trustworthy in holding their customers’ money.

2: Preparing their agents with the information and skills to tackle nuanced and emotional requests.

3: The overwhelming number of calls they receive daily due to macroeconomic factors.

Call analytics technology is a deployable solution that helps to solve these three problems.

First, the mood of a caller and how an agent adapts to it can greatly impact the outcome of a conversation. With the help of Conversation Analytics, you can better understand  the sentiment of a call as well as its eventual outcome, enabling you to give nuanced training to contact centre staff. This helps to curate efficient customer journeys and maintain the trust they have in the FSI.

Second, the platform rates every call you to receive and then organises call recordings by result to train staff at handling policy queries correctly to provide a better customer experience. This drives improvement in the short term and produces a better-performing team with a lower staff turnover in the long run.

Third, using speech analytics technology to monitor calls at scale can help you understand how often the keywords that matter to the business – such as mortgage or pension – are appearing in conversations. By knowing what exactly customers are calling to ask about, you can streamline the call deflection channels to give swift answers to customers- reducing the overall number of calls for your agents to handle.

The opportunities of the recession

The recession poses both a problem and an opportunity for FSIs and their customer experience teams. By employing technology to streamline the customer journey, managers can use those insights to train their agents to provide excellent customer service, and not just protect their brand’s reputation- but enhance it.