4 Ways Financial Institutions Are Elevating Their Customer Experiences

Banking experiences have evolved greatly since the days of traditional banking. Over the past few years and partly as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, financial institutions have incorporated technology to advance and enhance their customer banking experiences.

Many of these advancements are attributed to contact center technologies. Financial institutions of all sizes  leverage ice Contact Center to enhance their banking experience. ice Contact Center is an omnichannel contact center solution that modernizes businesses call center with application integrations, AI, and analytics across your communication channels.

Continue reading to discover how 4 financial institutions enhanced their customer banking experiences using contact center technology, like ice.

1. Centralized Agent Management to Extend Hours of Operation: A bank group operated individually across multiple time zones and were not connected through any network. This caused customers to have longer wait times as all the phone lines were dispersed. ice Contact Center helped the bank unite its agents into one virtual queue environment to fully leverage their centralized services. By consolidating the agents’ separate phone lines into a toll-free number, ice enabled customers to call in and connect to whichever agent is available. This allows agents to be more accessible and extends their hours of operation, resulting in better customer service for the organization.
2. Offloaded Agents and Simplified FAQ: A trade association’s IVR menu was complicated which took a long time for patrons to navigate. The customer service representatives were often frustrated as they spent a lot of time answering common, repetitive questions because of customers bypassing the IVR menu and pressing 0 to speak with an agent. When the organization migrated their contact center to ice, they streamlined customer service by introducing a unique feature. This feature allows callers to speak their needs instead of dialing on a keypad. The most significant number of inbound calls were people requesting information about interest rates and exchange rates. Using IVR and text-to-speech functionality, the association can play back the responses to these requests, offloading agents to focus on solving more complex issues.
3. Improved Profitability and Reduced Costs: A Global Bank based out of Britain who provides retail banking services along with corporate and investment banking services was operating a large internal contact center for their IT help desk. While necessary, the contact center had significant staffing requirements and was costly to run, cutting into profits. They decided to seek out a modernized contact center solution and they found ComputerTalk. With ice, they were able to integrate their contact center with a custom chat bot that handled inquiries like a live agent. The integration enabled them to reduce contact center staffing needs by over 50% over the course of 3 years, providing significant costs savings and a boost in profitability.
4. Increased First-Call Resolution: A bank previously relied on a legacy solution with which they had experienced inefficiencies that negatively affected both agent and customer experiences. As a result of these inefficiencies, agents were unable to retrieve information from their database efficiently, resulting in long wait times for customers. After switching to ice Contact Center, they increased first-call resolution and reduced instances of call transfers, holds, and callbacks. A custom web-based interface was built to connect their ice Contact Center application to their database. This connection allowed agents to easily access and navigate all industry-related information. Today, the data retrieval process runs so quickly that agents can remain in a natural conversation with callers and guide them on the next steps without missing a beat.

These are just a few examples of how financial institutions and credit unions are using contact center technologies to improve their customer service. By integrating with an advanced contact center solution, you can enhance your customers' banking experiences, too! If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your business, check out this guide to discover how a contact center adds value to your financial institution and speak with a specialist today!