How are your customer service performance goals progressing so far?
With customer service, it comes down to if your customers are happy and satisfied with your brand, you will enjoy a smoother and more profitable experience. But within that simple metric are a number of ways to look at the level of service you offer.
From focusing on customer relationships and tracking loyalty to more process-oriented improvements – such as deflecting low-value inquiries from high-effort channels – there are many important considerations.
With this in mind, we’ve been looking back on some of our articles over the previous six months to examine the most important areas of focus for retail banks and credit unions.
Focus area: Improving customer relationships
Customer relationships are greatly aligned to trust. When customers feel that their personal information could be leaked or used for fraudulent purposes, they are on guard. These customer concerns manifest as “fear, mistrust and even apathy,” which has a marked impact on the quality of the customer relationship.
A strong customer relationship, on the other hand, can have wide-ranging benefits, from greater upsell and cross sell likelihood – particularly when it comes to larger products like loans or mortgages.
Focus area: Customer loyalty
Customer loyalty is closely related to customer relationships, although a customer can be loyal without the frequent interactions involved in strong relationships.
Customer loyalty comes down to emotion, with Forrester finding that only 48% reporting that their experience with their bank was “emotionally positive.” What’s more, feeling just one emotionally positive feeling (such as feeling understood, respected, confident, valued and appreciated) can have a huge impact.
A reported 69% or more would remain with the brand, 65% would invest more in the brand and 62% would become brand advocates directly because of this.
This means that the main driver of loyal customers is service, with an efficient, empathetic, and adequate customer service.
Focus area: Customer upsells
A strong customer experience and positive interactions are the foundation needed to encourage an increased customer upsell rate. In fact, according to studies just 20% of customer interactions within a company result in 80% of the organization’s revenue.
High-touch service experiences, such as Co-Browsing or Co-Apping, are particularly useful in providing the level of collaboration that leads to upsells. When combined with personalized product offers and swift issue resolution, it can help boost customer conversion rates.
For example, by employing these tactics, Raiffeisenbank improved their conversion rate by 8%.
Focus area: Reducing churn
Ideally, your customer service representative should enjoy dealing with people and have a natural way with them. Of course, in a digital environment, this alone isn’t enough.
They also need to have the tools at their disposal to be able to meet the needs of the customers.
It’s this mix of human ingenuity and the right tools that is essential to ensure the kind of experience that reduces churn. And this is a hugely pressing issue for the industry.
According to a Forrester report, customer retention in US banking dropped from 78% in 2022 to 76% in 2023.
This means that, once again, the quality of the customer experience is vital to reduce churn and encourage more positive customer interactions.
Focus area: Deflecting low-value inquiries
One way to help your customer service team is by deflecting lower value inquiries to self-service channels in order to empower your customer and free up agents for more complex tasks.
Generative AI chatbots – as part of your Conversational AI capabilities – are now capable of drawing on your existing knowledge base to better effect. For Raiffeisenbank, leveraging the combination of Generative AI and Live Chat channels allowed them to double their efficiency and achieve a 4.1/5 customer satisfaction rating following customer feedback.
To achieve a quality customer service experience, it is essential that your agents have the space to dedicate time to customers who need special attention. This is only possible through channel deflection.
Focus area: Leveraging Generative AI
Overall, Generative AI needs to be incorporated more thoroughly into financial service institutions’ customers service offering.
There are currently three main use cases where the technology can be applied. These represent important opportunities for improvement across all communication channels, providing creative solutions to improve the overall satisfaction level of customers.
Customer chatbot
Chatbots powered by Generative AI not only provide answers to simple inquiries, but can also generate more involved responses to help make informed decisions, with better response rates. While human support is still necessary for emotional decisions, more factual information can be gleaned from the chatbot itself.
Data capture
To boost agent efficiency and improve the experience for customers, specialist bots can be used to capture data in various scenarios. For example, if a customer would like to take out a mortgage, the bot can gather the relevant information before moving on to a human agent, such as type of property, if they’ve closed the sale, and more.
AI Co-Pilot
The chatbot capabilities are there to support the customer and the advisor. The Co-Pilot use case is for the latter. When talking on a Live Chat channel, the Co-Pilot can generate suggested (and accurate) responses for the agent, who can edit them as they see fit.
This can greatly speed up serving individual customers, improving the Average Response Time, the Average Resolution Time, and more.
Focus area: Mobile service
Mobile banking apps are now the go-to for customers who want to carry out simple operations or get status updates. However, there is still a gap between where customers are and the quality of service available from that channel.
To put it in simple terms, the service options available to customers on mobile should be exactly the same as what is available on desktop or other channels. That means offering a collaborative experience like Co-Browsing but in a native environment.
By giving agents the ability to serve customers on the channel where they most frequently go, you can improve efficiency, build trust, and boost upsell potential.
Empower your customer support team
Outstanding customer service requires a mix of happy customer service agents and positive feedback from your base. There is much that goes into this, from customer response times and meeting customer expectations, to how your center agents approach complex issue resolution, improving customer resolution rates as a result.
The valuable insights that you gain throughout the year should be used to feed into your customer service strategy – with a view to improving customer service performance moving forward.
By identifying the area that you need to work on, whether improving average response times, better dealing with customer complaints, or simply going the extra mile with communication skills, your institution can directly increase your conversion rate.
At Unblu, we offer an effective solution to help financial services institutions to embrace continuous improvement in their customer service.