Table of Contents
The 5 Best Practices for Omnichannel Banking
Without any further ado, let’s delve into the best practices regarding omnichannel banking—strategies that will help you link your channels effectively and drive customer satisfaction.
Integrate Your Infrastructure
If you want to deliver an omnichannel customer experience, you need to link all your channels—this might seem like a truism, but the truth is that this link needs to be extremely strong. You don’t want to create weak connections where customers need to do a part of the work or where your channels aren’t fully integrated.
To be successful, you need an omnichannel banking platform that will integrate the data from all your channels into a single source of truth. Otherwise, the transition between them will simply not be seamless.
Create a Single Customer Data Overview Interface
Integrating your data is just the first step—your teams need to access it with ease. Therefore, after building the infrastructure, you need to create an interface that is usable for customer service agents working in different channels. This will streamline cooperation and give your employees better insight into customer data, enabling higher personalization and adopting a more proactive approach.
Make Customer Experience Consistent
If a customer contacts your bank via chat and your agent adopts a certain tone of voice (usually to adapt to the customer), the last thing you want to do is to change that when they call your contact center. If your agents claim A via email, you don’t want them to claim B in a physical branch.
Maintaining customer experience consistency is one of the key best practices for omnichannel banking. Without it, your clients won’t feel that they can switch between channels freely, as they will start believing that some channels are simply better than others.
Utilize AI for Data Analytics
The power of AI in banking customer service does not lie in chatbots and prompters, although these are also useful tools. Its true strength is the ability to process vast amounts of data and extract insights from them. But what does it have to do with the omnichannel approach?
Once you integrate your data, you will have more information about each client and their interactions with your bank than ever before. Thanks to this, you will be able to make more accurate predictions—from detecting churn and preventing it to offering personalized product recommendations. However, to do so, you need AI, as you will find it impossible to analyze such voluminous data on your own. Hence, if you plan to embrace omnichannel banking, one of the best practices is to use an AI-powered data analytics engine from the start.
Don’t Stop on Omnichannel—Go for Optichannel Instead!
Finally, you need to remember that omnichannel banking is just the beginning—the best practice here is to aim higher for optichannel banking. But what’s the difference in the first place?
Omnichannel banking is all about enabling your customers to switch between channels seamlessly, but it does not ensure that each of these channels is equal. Optichannel banking, on the other hand, takes this approach further and is focused on enabling your clients to use the channel that is most convenient for them at a given time.
In practice, this means that you should ensure that every channel gives as much possibility as the other. This might require implementing additional tech, like automated authentication (with biometrics, ML, and AI), modifying your procedures, or enabling digital signatures. However, in the end, this will result in elevated customer satisfaction, improved loyalty, and lower abandonment rates in processes like digital customer onboarding.
The Takeaway
The above are our five best practices regarding omnichannel banking. Remember that the omnichannel approach is no longer an asset—it becomes a standard, a feature distinguishing market leaders from laggards. Therefore, invest in the right platforms, integrate your data, deliver consistent customer experiences, and embrace AI-powered analytics to provide your customers with what they expect—omnichannel, no, truly optichannel customer service.
You might also read: Revolutionizing Customer Engagement: The Optichannel Approach in Banking
