What is a bank without excellent customer service? One with not-so-great reviews and a high customer abandonment rate!

Exceptional customer service is the key differentiator in the financial services industry. Here are a few data points to support this:

• According to World Retail Banking Report 2021, retail banks face the decision to align their offerings to customers or risk losing them altogether
• Supporting customers through empathy has enabled banks to achieve an average revenue growth of 1.3% in 2020, which is 1.9 points higher than those who did not
• The absence of customer trust, which has declined, can make it more challenging for banks to retain customer relationships

The pressure is on financial institutions (FIs) to find out how they want to engage with and bring value to their customers, and how they can differentiate themselves. In our technology-driven world, banks and credit unions have umpteen opportunities to leverage digital technologies to improve their offerings, innovate, and enhance their customer experience, beginning with customer service.

Let's get started on the five effective ways FIs can improve their customer service:

 1.       Understanding customers' needs

While every financial institution claims to understand customer needs, the reality is different. Often, banks offer pre-approved car loans to all customers visiting their website, irrespective of their needs. Scenarios like these lead to lost opportunities. On the other hand, if financial institutions are able to gauge the customer requirements at the interest stage, they can compress the sales cycle. For example, financial institutions are now joining the embedded financing bandwagon to help customers make purchases without hassle.    

2.       Developing a seamless, omnichannel customer experience 

Financial institutions leverage various channels to sell their products, including in-branch, online, and mobile. However, the processes across these channels are often broken and disjointed. Financial service providers must iron out wrinkles across customer touchpoints to ensure a consistent experience across channels, personalized and contextual communications, and seamless back-office operations. Adding assistive technologies such as Glia with co-browsing and video/audio chats can also help customers who may require assistance through the process.

3.       Leveraging contextual data

Unlike traditional financial institutions, fintech firms do exceptionally well when it comes to leveraging data. A key pointer for banks and credit unions to consider! Intelligent insights from data can be used to improve customer engagement and conversions through personalized offers. A robust contextual content services platform with natural language processing (NLP) capability can interpret context and analyze the sentiments from customer responses. For instance, collecting and applying text mining capability to customer comments on the bank's social media channels can help develop insights into overall customer sentiments. This will help the bank to focus on addressing customers' needs, be it overhauling their website to make it more intuitive, relooking branch staffing to cater to customers at peak times, offering more personalized products, and more.

4.       Empowering customers with self-service opportunities

In our fast-paced world, time is of the essence as customers expect quick service. And empowering customers with self-service portals to track requests, complaints, transactions, the status of loans, and the likes can go a long way in guaranteeing customer delight.  

5.      Using Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence can help banks leverage chatbots and virtual assistants to answer simple queries while routing more complicated requests to customer service agents. Furthermore, the agents can get detailed customer information from the generated data, allowing them to offer personalized service to customers.

6.       Improving visibility and transparency

Financial institutions can improve visibility in several ways, such as showing milestone-based views of online applications, progress bar, online status tracking, etc. The solution also enables complete case monitoring for financial institutions, where service agents can use the dashboard to track each case and download detailed reports. Tracking turnaround times at the request stage itself can ensure all accounts are monitored, and escalations are done when necessary. A full picture of the customer's interactions and activities can allow financial institutions to stay proactive and deliver exceptional customer service.

Conclusion

Financial service providers should pay attention to every customer's need and strive to deliver a glitch-free experience across touchpoints. They need to be on top of the latest trends and technologies that can help them up their ante in the customer service game. And integrating capabilities like machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence can enable them to stay ahead of the curve.