Leaves piled up in my gutter and a crisp chill in the air tells me Autumn has arrived once again. Whether you’re excited to see the change in seasons or sad to see the end of summer, I think it’s safe to say we can all look forward to that feast of comfort food and family that lies on the horizon. Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and it’s time to meditate on what makes us grateful.
At the top of my list are all the relationships in my life. Not just family, friends, and loved ones, but the colleagues and customers I have worked with, journeyed, and grown with this past year. However, fleeting some of our professional interactions maybe, even the shortest relationships can create memories of feeling valued and important.
Those memories are so important in business. They can turn a one-off transaction into a life-long partnership. They can transform customers into brand ambassadors, and contact center agents into daily heroes. Imagine a world where calling a 1-800 number actually makes, rather than breaks your day!
The power of business relationships is especially pronounced in the financial services industry, where companies manage hard-earned salaries and dream-filled nest eggs.
For banks and financial firms, customer relationships often last decades and can span nearly every part of our lives—from savings accounts and investments to insurance and mortgages. With such high importance placed on each interaction, every point of contact customers have with financial institutions is an opportunity to solidify the relationship and retain their business. In a world of option overload, making sure customers have positive experiences leads to loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and a higher customer lifetime value (CLV).
In this blog, we’ll talk about how financial services companies can reduce churn, add value, and gain insight into customers—all through digitally transformed contact centers.
Reduce Churn
Businesses spend up to five times more acquiring a new customer than they would to retain an existing one. In other words, your current customers are often far more valuable than those prospects camping out in your sales funnel. Improving your customer lifetime value means first addressing customer churn: all those reasons that customers may walk away from your company and seek better service, products, or prices from a competitor. Every opportunity to reduce customer churn can make a difference, as a 5% reduction in customer churn can boost net profits up to 80%.
Churn happens for any number of reasons, but at the end of the day, it’s almost always because customers perceive that the value of goods or services is less than the effort or money they pay in exchange. In the financial sector, people are not short on options for where to take their business. They can make big decisions based on small, but important details.
It only takes an instant for customers to feel that they are receiving poor service. Your contact centers present an exciting opportunity to interact with customers one-on-one and meet their demands the first time around.
Unfortunately, legacy contact centers are known for grievances like multiple call transfers, repetitive questions, poor visibility into customer information, long hold times, and a failure to resolve requests. Imagine calling a bank that you’ve paid upwards of 50 mortgage payments to, and they don’t even know your name or pass you around to three different agents.
With NICE CXone, small banks or enterprises can reduce churn and increase profits by addressing these issues in the contact center.
Through omnichannel routing, you can connect with customers on their preferred technology—from a mobile app, live chat, social media, email, phone calls, and more. Digital and voice interactions are matched to the right agent or self-service option the first time, reducing hold times and call transfers. Plus, you can lower the cost to serve each customer by improving first-call resolutions.
By addressing these causes of churn, you’re on your way to maximizing your customer lifetime value equation. But that’s just the first course.
Add Value
Turkey’s great and all—it’s what I expect in a November feast, and it definitely fills my stomach—but what keeps me at the table are Thanksgiving sides. Each bite of cranberry sauce or mashed potatoes makes the turkey that much more delicious. To keep your customers at the table, you need to go beyond satisfying their immediate needs and constantly add value through powerful data and integrated technologies.
NICE CXone can help you accomplish this by employing intelligent bots and virtual agents as an extension of a company’s workforce. Nowadays, customers prefer a digital-first solution, and oftentimes, their questions can be solved entirely by artificial intelligence chatbots. CXone lets customers move between self-service, agents, and different channels without waiting in the queue or having to repeat themselves. If a website visitor is interested in home loan services, for instance, they can go to your website and enter a virtual chatroom. From there, they may be interested enough to speak to an agent on a digital channel. And if they have more detailed questions about their account, CXone will elevate them to a voice call—all without a delay or gaps in information.
AI can also augment live support experiences, helping contact center agents identify opportunities to cross-sell and upsell new products and services. That family that moved into a new home in the suburbs may just be in the market for a new car to get them to their job in the city. NICE CXone calculates, predicts, and presents these opportunities to your agents to create a seamless, value-added experience for customers.
Customer Insight
Ready for dessert? NICE CXone serves a heaping helping of pumpkin pie by connecting client data across your entire organization and integrating contact center software with your CRM. With a 360-degree view of your customer that’s always up-to-date, you can better train agents, measure customer sentiment, and solve anticipated problems before they occur.
For example, CXone Agent for Microsoft Dynamics bridges customers’ history in the contact center with data from sales and marketing. This connection drastically boosts productivity and helps agents better personalize interactions. It also simplifies your backend, doing with one solution what you would otherwise need four to six different applications to accomplish.
An experience to be grateful for
My mother-in-law won’t let us leave the Thanksgiving table until we’ve all opened a little gift. Often just a trifle, these unique gifts are always picked out with everyone in mind and remind us how grateful she is for us. I have a shelf of these gifts as they’ve piled up throughout the years because no matter how small or seemingly insignificant they are, they remind me of how our relationship has grown and solidified since we first met.
It’s the small details and the experience of being cared for that ultimately drives a customer to stay with your company for life. So, give your customers something to be thankful for this year, and you’ll find they will pay you back tenfold.
