Leverage multi channel assets to drive organic growth in retail banking

Bryan Socransky, Director of Strategic Solutions at Genesys Telecommunications, explains how retail banks can drive organic growth and provide a superior, highly differentiated customer experience. They can leverage their contact centre technology and assets to proactively engage with online customers – using online activity to make more informed and relevant cross- and up-sell offers in offline channels.

Monetise the Web

Many customers start their research and buying cycles online, yet most banks have limited proactive online engagement with their customers. As a result their online channels suffer from poor sales performance. Banks and their customers can both benefit from the online channel delivering self-service – for example providing account balance verification, bill payment or money transfers.

However, when customers are shopping for their next financial product or service, it is in the interest of banks to connect with the customer by offering a human-to-human interaction at that point. This encourages positive conversations with high-value customers and hot prospects, which increases conversion rates of online shoppers.

Many banks today operate their online channel with a hope and prayer strategy. Banks hope that their online customers will come into the branch to purchase products and they pray that customers do not use the Internet to comparison shop and look for a better offer. This is no longer a feasible strategy especially for market segments such as young professionals and the affluent, since both groups are generally comfortable researching and buying many financial products online.

The reality is that these lucrative segments of the market are not interacting with their bank through the traditional channels. They use the Internet to comparison shop and make buying decisions as quickly as possible – as they are often time-poor. A 2007 Forrester survey shows that 42% of applicants would likely choose a competitor if a bank does not offer an online application.

As customer expectations change, traditional retail banks will have to proactively engage with customers while they are online. Stepping in at the moment that customers are in a buying mode helps convert them – before they have the chance to go to a competitor. Any lost opportunity like this does not affect just one product sale: the entire relationship with that customer becomes unhinged. If that customer goes somewhere else for one thing, they are more likely to move all their business away to that bank.

Sales of some products, such as credit cards, can often be completed entirely online. More complex and higher value products such as mortgages, will still require human assistance and validation – but the Web can be leveraged as a lead generation channel. Contact centre advisors can engage with customers in real-time and move them through the sales cycle – either bringing them into a branch to complete a sale or offering advice on the customer’s next steps. This kind of high quality conversation will increase the bank’s sales conversion rates.

When a customer is actively researching a product, this is the best time to engage with them: they are already at an advanced stage of lead qualification. Compare this to traditional marketing options, such cold calling, email or direct mail, which are costly and have low conversion rates and you can see the benefits. Pro-active cross-channel contact helps to promote customer loyalty because offers are based on individual customer knowledge, rather than demographic profiles, which are based on estimations of customers’ needs.

Align Contact Centre Resources with Channel Usage

The increase in consumers researching financial products and services online has meant that website traffic for most banks is now higher than typical contact centre call volumes. Nevertheless many contact centres remain exclusively focused on traditional, reactive interactions, such as inbound voice, email and fax. This strategy sees them have to grapple with fluctuating call volumes and suffer from under-utilisation of staff during certain times of the day.

The worst case scenario for a bank is to have idle call centre agents while high value customers are online researching their next purchase – but this is happening at many banks right now. These customers may be hesitant about how to proceed, or not sure about how to reach out for human assistance – but there is no-one there to help them. The l eading banks are currently integrating their contact centres with the online channel to stop this from happening. Proactively engaging online customers at the right time can see high net-worth customers contacted at the right time to optimise sales conversions.

Integration with the web can be easily done b y leveraging existing call centre technology. Visibility of agent availability and accurate prioritisation of interactions through a universal queue helps to manage every customer, regardless of channel. This can be effectively combined with online traffic monitoring and a visitor engagement engine to escalate online interactions at the right time. These complimentary technologies enable call centre agents to focus on the online channel when there is idle capacity or when a website opportunity is of higher value than other interactions in the queue. Proactive invitations to interact are presented to online customers at this time, encouraging them to speak with an agent. Once the customer accepts this invitation, they are routed to the right place – whether that is the contact centre, back-office or local branch.

Customers need to be matched to the right resource in real time to optimise the opportunity. This requires the routing technology to find the appropriate agent, for example an expert on the product of interest (eg. mortgage) or an agent skilled in communicating across the customer’s preferred channel, which could be the phone or web-chat. This is significantly different than basic click-to-chat or click-to-talk solutions – as this solution ensures that the customer reaches the right resource, not a small isolated pool of agents.

Enable Cross-Channel Conversations

Many higher-value products require customers to work across multiple primary banking channels. Customers research online, call into the IVR, transfer to the contact centre for support, and then close the sale with a contact centre agent or in a branch. If banks cannot adequately manage the customer experience as customers move between channels, results are poor. At a minimum, banks need to retain the knowledge of a customers’ activity and needs as expressed by their behaviour in the online channel and re-present this into the contact centre and branch. For example, if a customer spends a significant amount of time online looking at home mortgage information the next time they call into the contact centre or go into the branch they should receive an up-sell offer for home mortgages.

Only through effectively and intelligently serving customers at each and every touch-point across the enterprise will a bank succeed in customer service. Banks must show that they know and understand their customers’ needs and can therefore be trusted to advise on financial matters – not just be a vendor of financial products. This insight into the customer and their needs makes them feel valued by the bank, which has their best financial interests at heart. This stops the customer from feeling that they dealing with a monolithic financial entity, instead the customer feels that they have a personal banker to guide them towards the right products and services for their needs.

Today the cross- and up-sell success rates in contact centres and branches are relatively low as most banks lack a clear cross-channel view of customer interactions. A customer who spends hours researching mortgages on their bank’s website and then phones the contact centre is just as likely to receive an up-sell offer for a credit card as a relevant one for a mortgage. A customer’s actual online activity is one of the best indicators of their product preferences and yet most banks still ignore this valuable insight.

Integrating the primary banking channels and connecting high-value sales prospects with the most relevantly skilled agent enables banks to achieve organic growth goals and optimise their resources. Banks that proactively offer human assistance to high-value sales prospects who are on the website can stop the competitive shopping cycle and increase customer wallet share.

Contact centre infrastructure requirements to support organic growth

Banks that maximise their contact centre assets and cross-channel conversations all execute on these capabilities as a minimum:

• Real-time decision making. Match the right bank resources to customer needs. Create the greatest value for the bank and deliver the best experience to the customer.
• Rank, prioritise and distribute interactions in a manner governed by business logic and guided by desired outcomes. Banks that follow a segmentation strategy should offer premium level service to high value customers, for example. If a high value customer is online and experiencing problems or exhibits interest in a new product then they should receive a prompt from the bank. The best banks don’t wait for the customer to contact them.
• Actively monitor and gain insight into customer web behaviour and then use that insight to affect excellent service by offering real-time engagement.

Retail banks that do not have these capabilities risk losing customers to more progressive banks that are able to deliver an optimal customer experience.

To learn more about how Genesys can help you drive organic growth by optimising cross-channel conversations, visit www.genesyslab.com/crosschannel or contact Bryan Socransky at bsocrans@genesyslab.com.