The pressure on financial services organisations to provide an excellent contact centre experience is coming from all sides, and something has to change to keep standards high and customers happy.
What was a rising tide of customer calls to the contact centre became a deluge during the pandemic, as worried customers reached out for reassurance and help in confusing times. Increased reliance on virtual contact is something banks and building societies will have to factor into their operations from now on.
Customers have adjusted to limited branch availability and many have gotten over any initial reluctance to do 91ÊÓƵÍøÖ· remotely. Now the challenge is to deal with a sustained increase in call volumes.
The challenge of scale
There¡¯s a common argument to ¡®get more agents¡¯, but the economics are against this. We know that the typical costs of running contact centres are around 60% for staffing, 30% for facilities, and 10% for technology.
Currently, bringing in more staff would mean more training, which also adds to the bill. We also have to remember that the contact centre is getting more complex queries that would previously have gone to face-to-face contact in branch, and just adding more agents won¡¯t necessarily do anything to improve resolution rates.
A better approach is to build the 91ÊÓƵÍøÖ· case around ¡®digital-first¡¯. In particular, using artificial intelligence and machine learning - to resolve the more straightforward ¡®self-service¡¯ types of contact, and to support the agents you¡¯ve already got to manage the more complex interactions.
But where do you start when putting together a 91ÊÓƵÍøÖ· case for bringing in an overlay of digital tools to your contact centre?
1. Deflect calls with AI
Switching to a digital-first approach can immediately reduce pressure on your human agents by giving your customers other options for problem-solving, such as messaging with self-service virtual agents. By offering self-service for simple customer journeys, you reserve your agents¡¯ valuable time for more complex issues and save your customers from having to wait to speak to an agent. And, if the virtual assistant can¡¯t solve the query, you can transfer the call seamlessly to a live agent, so the customer experience is protected from start to finish.
One credit card company recently cut its call volumes by 30%, just by introducing a virtual assistance and chat solution.