What Do Financial Leaders Need From Their Uc Analytics Tools?

Ben Nicklen, COO at UC and workplace data analytics software organisation, Tiger, explores this topic in greater depth.

There’s no doubt that the financial services industry is experiencing an evolution.

With a rise in modern fintech firms, traditional high-street banks have been forced to sit up and take notice. The next generation of customer — an increasingly tech-savvy consumer — is becoming enticed by the range of benefits offered by challenger banks. So, with an ageing client-base, how can traditional banks begin to tip the balance?

Certainly, attracting and retaining customers must be a priority. But if one of the key benefits of a traditional bank is its high-street presence, amid a raft of branch closures, how can they retain loyal customers, while appealing to a new breed of banking user?

Insight is the key, and lots of it. But what exactly do financial leaders need from their UC analytics tools?

An ability to enhance customer service

One of the things customers love about going into the bank is the personal service. There’s the opportunity to build a rapport and trust, with a single person — without waiting hours on the line for a response. So, for people who are suddenly expected to change the way they’ve always done business, their experience needs to be seamless. Likewise, for a tech-savvy generation, they want answers at their fingertips. This kind of consumer isn’t afraid to switch providers, so those who don’t fulfil their expectations, may not be given a second chance.

Analytics provides a means to help financial institutions enhance their omnichannel communications, ensuring ease of access, and a swift response — via whichever method of contact a customer chooses.

When it comes to telephony, monitoring the number of calls, the length of wait times, and documenting any calls that are missed, unlocks a vault of knowledge — enabling financial leaders to gain a greater understanding of customer habits and plan their staffing resource to respond accordingly.

A means to drive future improvements

With an abundance of data at their disposal, financial leaders can drill down into insight to discover customer trends, to understand where the organisation is excelling, and in which areas further attention is required.

Better still, the information gathered can be blended with other data to establish patterns. For example, looking at which calls have been missed, or have bounced from number to number, cannot only help to identify areas for improvement but also assist in pinpointing customers whose experience hasn’t been positive. As a result, this offers the option to repair any breakdown in relationship, before the customer is lost to another provider.

Through the wealth of data generated on a daily basis, financial leaders can effectively plan for the future — whether that means adjusting staff ratios to account for changes in demand, identifying training needs, or justifying decisions to upgrade equipment and improve call quality.

Assess risk

Fraud presents an increasingly common risk to the financial sector. In fact, it’s estimated that the industry prevented £736.1 million of unauthorised fraud in the first six months of 2021, equivalent to £6.49 in every £10 of attempted unauthorised fraud being stopped without a loss occurring.

Analytics can help in detecting disingenuous calls, highlighting suspicious numbers so that any resulting encounter can be approached with the appropriate levels of caution. It also plays a valuable role in risk modelling — identifying customers who present a fraudulent risk to the organisation through a variety of activity such as multi-claim challenges or impersonation.

Address the need to remain compliant

But with platforms such as Microsoft Teams only storing data for a short amount of time, if not retrieved and stored elsewhere, the insight will be lost forever, raising compliance issues and making historic reporting difficult.

Should a customer raise a complaint two years later, companies without the relevant data could find themselves liable — a scenario that can easily be avoided with the use of the correct UC analytics tools, with unlimited storage capabilities.

Amalgamate data sources to produce meaningful insights

With financial institutions using a variety of communications platforms, they are faced with vast quantities of data that are dispersed. Finding a way to amalgamate and make sense of this wealth of intelligence is invaluable.

Doing so manually is not only labour and time intensive, but potentially inaccurate too. However, by utilising UC analytics tools, data from diverse sources can be viewed through a single pane of glass to provide meaningful, contextualised insight which can be used to inform and positively transform an organisation.