Ebanking migration crisis: How to ease the burden on service channels

The worst-case scenario has happened – your ebanking migration has not gone smoothly and it is having a negative impact on the customer experience. As a result, the customer service team is being inundated with calls from unhappy customers. 

They are quickly overwhelmed and any efforts to deflect calls or arrange call backs at a later date are not enough to stem the tide. What can the bank do to save its reputation? 

What can go wrong?

These kinds of crisis situations are not unheard of and there are a few well documented cases. One example happened back in 2018 when TSB faced a crisis due to an IT error after an ebanking migration, leaving thousands locked out of their accounts. 

As a result, TSB was fined 29.75 million pounds by the FCA and 18.9 million pounds by the PRA. Although they were able to receive a 30% discount by agreeing to settle the issue, it was still a huge financial, reputational, and operational failure. Likewise, more recently, Deutsche Bank experienced a similar issue, where thousands of customers were locked out of their accounts, in some cases for weeks. 

In both cases, while various teams worked around the clock to fix the issues, the frontlines of the disasters were held by the customer service team.

The quality level of your customer service team 

The fact of the matter is that a bank’s ability to ride the storm and regain control of their customer service lines depends largely on how well you have planned in advance. While damage control is possible through social media, the news, and other PR channels, there is only so much the service team can cope with.

At a macro level, there are two overarching areas that need to be strong for a customer service team to emerge in a positive light after a crisis: human talent and the tools at their disposal. 

Human talent: Authentic, empathetic agents

When talking about human talent, we aren’t just referring to the number of people. It’s also essential to train your staff to be authentic and empathetic, especially when faced with a crisis. 

When an ebanking migration doesn’t go to plan, there is a sharp fall in trust that can be difficult to rebuild. As a result, all interactions with human agents need to do as much as possible to rebuild this sense of trust and avoid exacerbating the situation. 

Digital tools: Equipping the agents

That being said, a normal number of agents will be entirely unprepared to deal with the larger levels of incoming inquiries that result from a crisis of this type – especially if you are only working with traditional channels. 

For the greatest chances of overcoming the crisis, you need a mixture of Conversational AI capabilities and Live Chat, alongside high-touch collaboration like Video & Voice and Co-Browsing. 

How to ease the burden on service channels

Assuming you have well-trained staff and the right tools at your disposal, here’s how you can tackle an ebanking migration crisis.  

What’s more, unlike with phone calls, agents can handle more than one conversation simultaneously, boosting overall efficiency during a difficult period.

Are your service channels strong enough?

Whether you experience an issue with your ebanking migration or not, your service channels need to be robust enough to maximize the best-case scenario – or mitigate the worst. 

By bolstering your service team with the right tools and training, they can take a proactive approach in educating customers when things go right and provide much needed reassurance when an issue arises.

Unblu is a quick-deploy solution that can embolster your team’s capabilities to get control of a crisis situation.