Long gone are the days of free toasters for opening an account. Or promoting online banking as a unique offering. Today, banks differentiate themselves on customer service, which in our digital-first world now means OnScreen customer experiences.
Digital Customer Service (DCS) has become a strategic priority for banks seeking to deliver positive customer experiences, build loyalty and reduce attrition. But it’s not enough to simply offer customer service online. Companies need to deliver digital experiences that are easy, quick and feel personalized.
The Challenge: Getting from Point to Point
Today’s customers expect digital options for connecting with their bank. To offer customer choice, many banks simply add separate chat, video and sometimes CoBrowsing features to their website or mobile app. While these bolt-on technologies check the box for multi-channel functionality, they also create a disparate system that induces a broken, fragmented customer experience.
Customers who start with live chat are often asked to call a separate corporate phone number to speak with a representative, for example, if the issue can’t be resolved in chat. A process that creates friction for customers, which in turn drives up abandonment rates. Worse yet, it breaks the digital flow of customer engagement.
Bolt-on point solutions are fine for customers who do not need to switch to another channel—between chat, voice and video. But what happens when a customer in chat is tired of typing and wants to speak with a representative or perhaps would like a video chat? For banks with a multiple point solution, customers would have to break the digital connection to make a call or launch a video chat. Another fragmented experience.
In addition to frustrating customers, this fragmented approach is unable to transfer data and context from customer engagements across channels. Creating even more friction as customers need to start from scratch in each new channel, re-verifying their identity and re-explaining the situation. Suddenly that friendly question “How may I help you?” becomes a negative. It’s a drain on customer loyalty and rep efficiency.
The fragmented approach severely limits banks from improving digital customer service over the long run too. Separate systems mean disparate reports and an incomplete view of the customer journey. Which makes it challenging to analyze, learn and improve upon the customer experience.
The Solution: Seamless and Simple
The convenience of digital customer service is lost if the customer has to work too hard to—frankly—make it work. Banks need to offer seamless customer experiences, where customers can easily transition from chat to OnScreen voice or video, without breaking the digital connection. Integrating multiple channel solutions can be extremely difficult and costly. Plus there are integration issues when a solution requires an update or upgrades a feature. It becomes a precarious house of cards.
Consider instead a digital-first DCS solution, with digital channels designed to allow seamless transitions that enable a single customer experience–without needless interruptions. A single platform designed to easily shift customers from chat to OnScreen voice, rather than forcing them to download extra software or make a separate phone call, for example. And a platform that can provide data and context from the entire customer journey as a means to help your customer service representatives—and also help your data science team discover new ways to enhance and improve the customer experience.
Bonus: Collaborate with Your Customers
Look into a DCS platform that provides collaboration tools that can significantly cut time and effort for customers and representatives alike. CoBrowsing has emerged as a powerful tool that can allow a representative to share the screen with a customer and even launch apps or help fill out an application for them. Seek DCS solutions that offer CoBrowsing across all channels, including chat, OnScreen Voice and video.
And don’t overlook one of the most useful and under-rated collaboration tools for customer service today–Live Observation. This feature allows a bank representative to see a customer’s screen (within the bank website or app only) for rich context. By seeing that a customer is on the home loan page and scrolling over an application, a representative can quickly and proactively provide answers on that loan offering and help the customer fill out the form. Live Observation has proven very popular among banks using Glia, for example.
Customer service has emerged as top priority as banks seek to deepen relationships with their customers and build preference for their services. Ultimately it comes down to a digital experience that answers a customer’s questions, quickly resolves any issues and leaves the customer feeling satisfied. To remain competitive, banks need to adopt a seamless approach that cuts friction points, reduces abandonments and boosts customer loyalty.
Glia is reinventing how businesses serve their customers in a digital world, supporting a growing list of financial institutions. Glia’s solution enriches web and mobile experiences with digital communication choices, OnScreen collaboration and AI-enabled assistance. Learn more at glia.com
To learn more about Digital Experiences, check out the new book Digital Customer Service: Transforming Customer Experience for an On-Screen World
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