As easier transactions and interactions move to digital channels, human agents can solve the more complex and critical ones and use customer conversations to drive sales when appropriate.
Over 80% of financial institutions agree that their customers are more impatient today, and likely to walk away if they don’t get value from their first interaction, according to Forrester Research. To deliver on newly elevated customer expectations and remain competitive against digital-first startups and technology behemoths looking for new revenue streams, financial institutions must make use of cloud-based customer support solutions and deploy them intelligently across their global operations.
Cloud-based support offerings encompass a daunting array of options, including conversational artificial intelligence, skills-based routing, workforce management, SMS texting, and so on. So, a prioritized roadmap is critical. But without the core infrastructure of a cloud-based contact center, financial institutions can’t take advantage of many of these offerings in the first place, leaving customers shortchanged, disappointed, and more likely to switch to a new provider.
What’s more, the channels, and mix of channels, customers use are constantly changing, which makes a cloud-based contact center key to delivering true omnichannel servicing.
The number and type of channels for customer support are exploding – with Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and WhatsApp Business among the most recent additions. And channels are evolving. Messaging, for example, has moved from synchronous (or continuous) to asynchronous, which allows conversations to be more open-ended and resumed later.
In addition, many channels now incorporate some degree of automation and AI for both agents and customers. For example, AI-powered agent-assist bots work side-by-side with customer service representatives, giving them information they need, when they need it, to help them respond to customer queries more quickly, accurately, and confidently.
The mix of channels that customers use is also fluid. And agents and organizations need to be able to meet customers where they are at any point in time. This is part of a necessary industry shift that Genpact’s recent research study,
Cloud-based solutions enable financial institutions to seamlessly incorporate new capabilities into their customer support ecosystems and make omnichannel integration a reality.
The cloud is not a silver bullet. A poorly designed mobile app or friction-filled authentication process will not be solved by moving it to the cloud.
Likewise, there’s no simple or magical solution to transitioning to cloud-based customer support. Moving from a legacy telephony or "brick and mortar" system to the cloud is challenging, particularly for organizations with multiple markets, locations, and languages. In addition to the immediate technological changes, there are downstream impacts on everything from business processes to employee responsibilities and compensation.
To succeed, financial institutions must take a programmatic, holistic transformation services approach that orchestrates change across people, process, digital, and data – always through the lens of the end user.
Therefore, it’s important for financial institutions to analyze, develop, and optimize customer and employee journeys. Specifically, they must assign journey owners with end-to-end accountability for the customer and agent experience; closely manage the key performance indicators and service level agreements of these journey owners; and identify, finely tune and continually update the knowledge base for conversational AI and chat bots.
Cloud-based chat bots and conversational AI can transform customer engagement, but financial institutions that implement them too quickly often learn costly lessons. For example, one large U.S. financial services firm allowed customers to cancel their relationship via a chat bot without talking to a live human, which caused many thousands of accounts to be cancelled, perhaps prematurely. Automating tasks and delivering service efficiency is critical, but there’s as much art as science to the strategy and implementation.
Another benefit of a cloud-enabled contact center is the ability to match customers with agents who have the skills to complete the required task.
