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What Is Omnichannel Customer Support in Banking?
Omnichannel banking refers to creating an integrated customer experience across all possible channels: both digital and traditional ones. It is often misunderstood for multichannel banking, which also involves utilizing various channels but not integrating them.
Omnichannel support in digital banking may also refer to the creation of a system that enables your employees to provide their services to the clients through various channels at almost the same time. It can be conducted, for instance, by providing agents in physical branches with a platform that lets them answer questions on the chat when there are no clients present physically.
Omnichannel Solutions in Banking vs. the Costs of Customer Support
The key advantage of embracing the omnichannel approach to customer support in banking is that it enables you to cut down the costs significantly. This is achieved mainly in two ways:
1. Building Omnichannel Branches
Have you ever analyzed how much time your agents at physical branches waste due to the lack of clients? It’s thousands of dollars – money that you could invest in much better ways. Yet, you cannot close the whole branch – there are still valuable clients that would not have access to your banking services otherwise. So, should you keep wasting money, or maybe lose clients and close the branch? Well, there is a third way – an omnichannel customer support platform.
By implementing omnichannel banking solutions like our platform, you can make sure that the time between clients coming to a branch isn’t wasted. When there is nothing to do at the branch itself, your employees can swiftly switch to digital channels and provide support for those clients who wish to contact your bank online. As a result, their time is utilized to the maximum, and the costs of support per client decrease. Plus, this lets you reduce the number of customer support agents working purely in digital centers.
2. Moving Your Most-Skilled Employees to Digital Contact Centers
Another possibility in such a scenario is to move the most skilled employees to one or two centralized contact centers focused on solving more complex cases and selling high-value financial products online.
By moving the operations run by senior agents into the digital realm, you once again can ensure that their time is used to the maximum, as the location no longer plays a role in determining the demand and it is easier to calculate how many skilled advisors you need at a time. Moreover, these skilled agents can also overlook simpler queries in the meanwhile, for instance, by accepting the answers provided by a virtual banking assistant in multiple chats.
Automation and Omnichannel Customer Support in Banking
Omnichannel support in digital banking might also help you introduce automation. This is mainly because it allows a swift transition between different communication channels, both for the employees and for the data.
Without an omnichannel customer support platform, employing tools like autonomous chatbots or KYC verification would be either impossible or ineffective – whenever a customer would prefer to talk with an agent, they wouldn’t have all the data required to make this transition smooth. But with an integrated system, this is no longer a problem.
If a customer starts their query online but then decides that they prefer to speak to an agent at a branch, the latter receives all the information, including the history from the chat. This enables them to quickly understand the particular situation in and out without forcing the client to explain it for the second time. What does it mean in practice?
- Your customers are happier and, thus, more loyal.
- You can decrease the costs of customer support by reducing the staff as you’re able to automate at least simple tasks.
- You use high-paid employees’ potential to the maximum, as simpler jobs can be done automatically.
- You may reduce the costs of your operations by eliminating “branches” such as isles in shopping malls – these were designed with convenience in mind, but now the internet is the new convenient channel.
Omnichannel Support in Banking: Conclusions
Omnichannel support in digital banking comes with a plethora of benefits. It’s an approach that can help you achieve major savings and improve the experience and loyalty of your customers, which is crucial when we consider current customer acquisition costs. Therefore, we advise you to adopt this approach and learn more about our customer support solution and how it can help you achieve much better financial results in your organization.
You may also read: Will the true Omnichannel please reveal itself?
