Building customer loyalty in financial services

CX challenges facing banks and insurers today

When engaging with businesses, customers expect fast, personalized, and interactive experiences. In fact, recent survey results indicate that 55% of customers would change brands to shop with a company that would offer a better customer experience.

Meeting consumer demands in an increasingly digital landscape, however, poses significant challenges for businesses due to the cumbersome and regulated nature of their operating environment. Inflexible legacy systems, the emergence of digitally native competitors, and the persistent threat of security breaches when making changes are costly obstacles hindering success.

Addressing these challenges requires a customer-centric mindset, investment in technology, process optimization, and ongoing adaptation to changing consumer expectations. By prioritizing customer experience, banks and insurers can foster loyalty, gain a competitive edge, and drive business growth.

The four fundamentals to win customer loyalty

A seamless omnichannel customer experience

Businesses need to meet consumers where they are, on the communications channels of their choice. When it comes to customer preferences, 75% of customers favor using digital messaging channels for customer service. Today’s new digital messaging channels like WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, Google’s Business Messages, or the ubiquitous SMS are all customer favorites when it comes to receiving mission-critical communications.

Customers expect to be able to access information quickly and receive additional support from a live agent should they require it, without having to repeat themselves. By leveraging the right technology and applications that can retain context and provide insights to personalize interactions, companies can meet these expectations quickly.

Proactive communications

While offering a range of communication channels is important, it’s also vital that businesses leverage customer data and history to anticipate consumer behavior and future needs. By doing so they can proactively suggest actions to customers. For example, notifying a customer of their upcoming direct debit will help them maintain sufficient balance for the debit to go through. Failing to do so may incur unnecessary penalties and lead customers to take their business elsewhere.

As alluded to above, businesses should be sending relevant and timely communications on their customers preferred channel whether that be by email, WhatsApp, SMS or another platform entirely.

Round-the-clock customer service

Being available around the clock helps build consumer trust. This doesn’t necessarily mean running the contact center 24/7 with all agents present. A combination of automated solutions and manual agent support could make the difference between good and great customer service. Using an Out-of-Hours (OOH) bot to acknowledge a customer’s request and inform them that their query will be addressed when the contact center opens can be an effective way to manage call peaks and improve the customer experience for example.

By doing so, customers are reassured that their request has been received and will be dealt with promptly, without the need for them to wait on hold or chase the bank for an update. Implementing an OOH bot can also help the bank to manage its agent capacity more effectively by allowing them to plan their staffing levels and allocate resources more efficiently. This can lead to a more balanced workload for agents and a more consistent level of service for customers, which can ultimately improve customer satisfaction.

Better engagement and less inbound calls

Digital messaging channels offer businesses a suite of features that can make customer interactions faster and more engaging. Browsing insurance policies and sharing premium paid invoices, bank statements, or account balance inquiries can all be done from within a messaging channel like WhatsApp or Apple Messages for Business. The rich messaging features of these channels allow customers to explore new products and services through carousels, choose items from a list of options, reply instantly using quick-reply buttons, and more.

Reducing the need for customers to reach out for additional support not only saves them time but it also reduces operational costs. Messaging allows agents to handle multiple conversations at the same time, whereas voice agents can typically only support one customer at a time. Skilled and effective live chat agents can typically support 2-3 customers simultaneously, while messaging agents can support 3-5 customers at a time, and messaging agents augmented with a bot can support 5-10 customers at once.

We are proud to have leading banks and insurance companies look to us as their technology enabler and leverage our cloud-based communication solutions to accelerate their digital transformation journeys and connect with their customers.

Explore how five banking and insurance providers win customer loyalty here. To find out how we can support your business get in touch here.

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