Balancing the quality of the customer experience with the cost of delivery – essential approaches for today’s high performance customer contact environment

While the economists debate whether we’re actually in recession or not, the market reality for many is that there is a slowdown, and that’s going to place increased pressure on the contact centre operations of organisations across the financial services market. A traditional response to economic uncertainty has been to over-react, with companies taking every opportunity to reduce costs and boost their own productivity. By doing so, however, we believe that financial services organisations risk inflicting long-term damage on both their operational effectiveness and on the health of the businesses they seek to support.

That’s why we believe it’s time for customer service directors to keep a cool head – after all, the challenge facing customer contact management remains the same as ever – that of balancing the quality of the customer experience provided against the cost of delivering it. Time and again, it’s those companies who succeed in creating a differentiated customer experience that are able to generate business value by driving loyalty, satisfaction and continued customer spend.

In this article we’ve highlighted four key developments that we believe financial services customer service directors should investigate to help optimise the performance of their contact operations. They are:

• How new conversational analytics techniques can play a key role in positively impacting customer behaviour and driving the right business outcomes
• The increasing use of contact centre workforce management techniques to drive performance improvement in retail bank branches
• New approaches to the collection and sharing of Customer Feedback within organisations
• Extending customer service into the back-office
  

Listening to what customers are really saying with Conversational Analytics

One of the problems with high volume financial services contact centre operations is that it has always been impossible for organisations to cut through the clutter of thousands of calls and millions of voice interactions to translate conversations into intelligence that can be acted upon to improve business performance. The application of Conversation Analytics changes that, combining proven psychological processes coupled with the latest speech analytics technologies to analyse and interpret contact centre conversations. 

By adopting a Conversational Analytics approach, financial services firms can gain unique insights into what their customers think, what they expect in terms of service and how their loyalty can be secured. Early adopters of these techniques have experienced substantial benefits. A Fortune 500 insurance company, for example, recently reduced incoming calls by 30%, avoiding a projected £600,000 hiring spend. The same company saved £500,000 by then streamlining its back office operations. 

Conversation Analytics is founded on the belief that customer interactions are a critical source of customer intelligence. It’s only by listening to their customers that companies can understand what it is they want and identify the weaknesses in their service operations that frustrate those desires. Implemented successfully, Conversation Analytics techniques can help financial services companies find the right balance between conversational quality and operational effectiveness – and provide them with a platform to create new improvement programmes that will make contact centres more efficient and agent conversations more effective.

Using Workforce Optimisation to transform the way bank branches are managed
It’s interesting that after more than two decades of trying to convince customers to use the telephone, self-service and the Internet, banks and building societies are re-discovering the branch and its key role in their multi-channel approach to customer service. Branches provide banks with a local presence and – together with the contact centre – serve as a primary customer touch point.

However, although strategically valuable, branches can also be terribly inefficient. Traffic into the branch is sporadic – resulting in periods of inactivity, followed by periods of waiting customers and long lines. Branches predominantly perform routine cash transactions, but they also handle more complex transactions, such as account openings and loan applications that require skilled personnel. Effectively operating a branch bank and managing its staff poses some unique challenges. The result has prompted interest in workforce optimisation (WFO) technology and business practices – including traditional workforce and performance management tools and emerging customer analytics practices – to help achieve optimal performance, drive cost savings and heighten customer satisfaction.

WFO solutions, which grew up in the contact centre, combine software and services that include staff forecasting and scheduling, quality monitoring, eLearning, performance management and customer feedback surveys. WFO automates these functions, enabling them to work synergistically to help achieve cost savings, improve productivity, and provide visibility into employee and customer behaviour. Recently, the deployment of these solutions in branch banks are helping to improve the overall performance of distributed locations.

WFO in the branch starts with forecasting customer demand and then translating the resource requirements into actual branch staffing schedules. Once employees are in place, bank branches leverage performance management and eLearning capabilities to gauge performance, efficiencies and build staff skills and competencies. This begins with planning branch objectives and developing role-specific, key performance indicators (KPIs) for branch employees. For example, if the branch goal is to open 100 special accounts per month, that goal can be broken down by WFO tools into individual targets or quotas. Counter staff KPIs may centre around schedule adherence and average transaction time to ensure customer service goals are met, for instance.  While traditional branch scorecards today focus almost exclusively on financial performance – WFO scorecards are tailored to the actual banking tasks and processes that branch staff carry out each day.

Once overall branch targets are in place, WFO tools for monitoring transaction steps and process times can provide bank managers with critical insight into the customer interactions conducted in their branch. The WFO solution can trigger screen recording on the bank staff member’s PC whenever that user is involved in a transaction of interest, such as an interaction with a particular class of customer. This enables managers to understand exactly which applications employees are using most, how each individual employee navigates through them, and the time it takes to complete important transactions.

For two decades, retail banks have driven down costs by encouraging consumers to move out of the branch and embrace lower-cost channels. Yet research clearly shows that when consumers wish to make a financial product purchase, they overwhelmingly prefer to visit the branch bank. Already more than 70 banks around the globe currently use Verint’s Impact 360 Retail Financial Services to optimise resources in their branches, including nine of the top 10 US banks. We believe that WFO is set to play a pivotal role in improving customer service across UK branches.  Those banks and building societies that deploy WFO solutions stand to gain significant competitive advantage in today’s ever-changing financial services arena.

Addressing the need for better customer feedback
Although organisations have recorded customer interactions for decades, it’s mainly been to focus on what the agents were doing rather than to listen to what their customers were actually saying. The result is that valuable customer feedback is overlooked and consigned to a database somewhere, rather than used to start improving products and processes.

Research from Bain & Company illustrates this problem, when it asked 362 companies whether they believed they had delivered a “superior experience” to their customers. 80 percent of the companies said that they thought they had. However, when Bain turned the question around and asked their customers whether they felt the same, only eight percent actually believed that the companies were providing the superior experience. That’s a big difference, and it shows the danger of developing processes from the inside out.

By adding customer feedback capabilities to their Workforce Optimisation (WFO) solution, businesses can capture customer intelligence and benefit from direct, first-hand customer feedback made available by advanced and fully scalable IVR, Web and e-mail surveying capabilities. A key benefit that comes from extending WFO solutions with customer feedback is the ability for organisations to compare and contrast their current internal key performance indicators with real and unbiased customer satisfaction ratings.

Customer feedback solutions are likely to dramatically influence the direction a company can take in terms of its quality initiatives, staffing models and training programmes. Coupling customer feedback software with quality monitoring and speech analytics technology goes a step further, enabling organisations to get from why to how, while quickly mining the database of recorded conversations to proactively identify trends and drivers impacting consumer actions, preferences and experiences.

Working together, these solutions provide a closed-loop system in which the voice of the customer can be used as a strategic asset for improving processes and performance, driving revenue and building competitive differentiation in a crowded market.

Going forward, those financial services firms without a structured way of collecting statistically valid customer feedback will be increasingly hard-pressed to hold on to their customers. The real benefit, however, will come when the real-time information provided by customer feedback systems – the true voice of the customer - can be used in combination with other Workforce Optimisation (WFO) technologies such as interaction recording and quality monitoring systems, to provide an even more comprehensive overview of customer and agent interactions.

Extending Customer Service into the back-office
Today, many financial services firms still under-estimate the impact that their back-office functions can have on customer service. We believe that truly customer-centric organisations need to have full visibility of the root causes that are driving customers to call their contact centres in the first place? What is really causing all that traffic?

When organisations drill down to identify the underlying reasons why customers call their contact centres, they often find that it’s a breakdown in back-office processes that’s forcing their customers to call. It might be a delay in processing a mortgage that’s caused a customer to ring for a status check; data entry errors that drive the customer to call to make a correction; or it might just be that a customer is uncertain about a product that they’re thinking of buying.

Whatever the reason, breakdowns, process issues and inefficiencies in the back office always translate directly into increased call volumes, repeat contacts and customer frustration in the branch and the contact centre. Such un-necessary repeat calls due to inadequate back-office processing not only drive down an organisation’s customer satisfaction levels but also significantly impact the bottom line.

In five years time we believe that more organisations will have taken their core contact centre Workforce Optimisation approaches and found ways to apply it to their back-office operations so that they can quickly identify process breakdowns, spot the root causes of call volume spikes, and focus in on those factors that are really sparking customer frustration.

Technologies such as IP and virtualisation mean that it’s now possible for financial services companies to extend customer service beyond traditional contact centre boundaries – not just into the back-office, but also into entirely new areas of an organisation such as branch offices, and supporting networks of home-workers and expert mobile workers. Separately, each of these initiatives can deliver significant benefits, however the collective advantage of integrating branch staff and home workers into corporate customer service programmes, and providing new visibility into customer service processes and actionable business insights about the impact of inter-departmental and back-office functions on overall customer service and satisfaction is significant.

It’s not enough just to make a connection with these staff; they need to be completely integrated into an organisation’s customer services infrastructure with the full support of technologies such as IP-enabled recording, competency-based e-learning, personal scheduling, analytics and quality monitoring applications. It’s a technology investment that makes real sense because of the sheer numbers involved. It’s not uncommon to find two to ten back-office employees for every one contact centre agent, and a decrease in just five per cent of errors can potentially equate to millions in bottom line cost savings.

Driving increased value through optimised contact centres
In today’s customer-centric financial services environment, the real key to success comes when organisations can capture information about their customer interactions, and ensure that business processes are in place to allow employees to make decisions based on the information in front of them. Their effectiveness can depend on the quality and ‘actionability’ of the information they are given, so it should be timely, accurate and readily shared among different groups – irrespective of where they are located. This data should also be easily searched and stored. The most advanced Workforce Optimisation solutions – the ones that will have the most market impact over the next five years – are now able to not only capture the core customer interaction data, but are also able to analyse it and then help organisations use it to make the right decisions.

Thanks to its increasingly integrated approach, WFO enables customer service teams to sort through thousands of interactions, pulling necessary information together quickly and then sharing it with the people who need to act on it. In short, WFO can provide financial services firms with a powerful process for capturing, storing, sorting, delivering, analysing and acting on customer and organisational performance data.

With an integrated WFO approach, all these different activities can be combined into a single, interoperable solution that provides visibility into an organisation’s entire customer service lifecycle, from initial planning and establishing goals to scheduling and deploying the appropriate staff, measuring and recording their performance, using that information to investigate and analyse results, and then changing business processes and adjusting employee skills to meet the goals. Such a fully optimised customer contact environment can help position organisations to make the most of their customer contacts – irrespective of the market conditions.