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Cloud-based Contact Center Solutions Help Financial Services Companies Stand Out
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Cloud-based Contact Center Solutions Help Financial Services Companies Stand Out

October 22, 2013

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By Tracey E. Schelmetic,
TMCnet Contributor

Financial services companies have always understood that, since they provide a rather commoditized product – for many people, a checking account is a checking account – they have to differentiate themselves from competitors by means of the excellence of the service they provide.


While advertising that “We provide excellent customer service” is easy, actually devliering can be rather challenging. Customers expect more from their banks and investment houses – even more than they do from other service providers. Customers want immediate attention and fast resolution, and they want to communicate with their banks via the channel of their choice.

Keeping customer service standards high while reigning in costs is a challenge for financial services contact centers. However, it’s somewhat less of a challenge today thanks to hosted contact center solutions, according to a recent article on Business2Community by Kelly Weinhold. She writes that by leveraging cloud and hybrid cloud platforms, banking, capital markets, wealth management and other business segments can optimize their contact center, self-service, and mobile customer experience while reducing operating costs, and increasing agent productivity.

“Overall, the financial services industry has become increasingly competitive and customers have more options than ever, making personalized customer care critical to staying competitive and successful in a digital world,” writes Weinhold. “According to the Ernst and Young Global Consumer Banking Survey, however, a third of banking customers have changed banks in the past 10 years. As customers move towards self-service options and mobile channels, delivering a personalized customer experience takes more than a friendly teller. It takes being available on any channel, at any time, with the information they are looking for.”

This latter challenge is where cloud-based solutions come in. Hosted contact center solutions providers such as Five9 (News - Alert) Inc. provide platforms for inbound, outbound, and blended solutions, each designed to support all types of contact center media for a variety of industries, including financial services. This means that if a banking customer initiates contact on one channel and follows up in another, the agent is able to see the full history of transactions. In a blended solution, contact centers can use inbound voice and self-service to drive proactive outbound customer outreach, which can vastly increase the quality of service for customers and cut down on the number of inbound calls a customer makes.

A cloud-based solution can improve productivity and customer loyalty with active call blending, and boost first-call resolution rates with skills-based routing and call prioritization (important for banks that wish to pay extra attention to platinum customer). By building a first-class customer service support structure using hosted contact center solutions, financial services companies can ensure that they are offering the highest possible quality customer service. This is a strategy that allows banks to not only win customers, but keep them for the long-term.




Edited by Blaise McNamee
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