What are the benefits of virtual branches in digital banking? Well, they make customer service more accessible, reduce overall costs, enhance internal communication and productivity, plus they might even… increase conversion rates. How is all of this possible, and are there any other perks? Find it out in this article.
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The Top 5 Benefits of Virtual Branches in Banking
So, what are the main advantages of setting up a virtual branch in your bank? Take a look at the list below.
Accessibility
Brick-and-mortar branches have the main upside and downside (at the same time) of being located in a specific location. On the one hand, this helps you reach out to potential and existing clients in the area; on the other hand, clients in branchless regions don’t have access to your services.
With virtual branches, you can easily eliminate this issue and become much more accessible. Your employees from different branches may provide their services online, broadening your bank’s range and making the services even more accessible. At the same time, your clients still have the option to visit traditional branches—they can choose the option they prefer.
Lower Operating Costs via Higher Productivity
The biggest impact of virtual branches on banking may be observed in terms of money. It all goes down to the enormous increase in productivity caused by a virtual branch.
For starters, take your idle employees in physical branches and give them online opportunities when no clients are available locally. This way, you decrease the amount of time wasted significantly and can carry out more sales with the same workforce.
Secondly, the digital platforms for virtual branches have many modules that further increase your employees’ productivity. For example, a meeting manager that lets customers book a meeting without engaging your team members, a digital document manager to access knowledge faster, or even an AI assistant to find specific information in shorter time spans is possible in the digital realm of virtual branches. What do all these solutions have in common? They accelerate your procedures significantly, leading to lower costs and higher customer satisfaction!
Enhanced Service Quality and Communication
A virtual branch employs only skilled, highly experienced workers. This comes with a major advantage: higher service quality.
Even if one of your workers does not know how to answer a difficult question about a certain product, this is not a problem—the customer may be transferred to another employee and expert in a given field. The latter does not have to be physically present, so your internal access to knowledge is much better.
Conversion Rates Going Up
Creating a virtual branch may also benefit your sales. It all goes down to the number of tools and solutions you can implement when offering your products and services online vs. in person.
For instance, you can increase your sales by catching up with your clients in messaging apps—it’s convenient and lets you show them that you care for them. You may also boost sales by analyzing client data and using real-time, smart product recommendations like those offered in LiveBank. The means to an end may differ, but in the end, it’s clear that improving conversion rates is among the benefits of virtual branches.
Streamlined Onboarding
Running a fully operational virtual branch lets you improve many of the procedures known from physical branches, including onboarding—the most important one for you as a business. After all, the more effective your onboarding is, the lower the customer acquisition costs, which nowadays easily exceed 1,000 EUR.
With digitized onboarding, your potential customers can:
- easily start the process from every place in the world,
- complete the whole onboarding process with minimal interaction outside the digital realm,
- proceed with the next steps whenever they have time, even if its after office hours.
On the other hand, your business may:
- introduce high-level automation (AI, OCR, biometrics) to accelerate the onboarding process,
- collect accurate data to improve the process in the future,
- increase the onboarding completion rates and decrease customer acquisition costs.
The Takeaway
As you can see, setting up virtual branches has many benefits in digital banking that directly translate into higher sales and overall improvements for your business. Therefore, at LiveBank, we believe that virtual branches are the future of banking, and we support them on our customer engagement platform. Did we spark your interest? Then, schedule a meeting today to learn more about LiveBank!
You may also read: Key Features of User Management Tools for Banks
