By Adam Faulkner, Director, Sabio
I believe there are three key factors that consistently impact great customer experience in financial services sector contact centres. Contact centre agents have to spend far too much time logging onto different internal systems and jumping between applications, keeping callers waiting on the phone. This is a direct result of the complexity agents face when having to use anything between five and ten separate IT applications when trying to meet the day-to-day needs of their banking or insurance customers.
Research I have been involved with shows that today's standard financial services 'agent desktop' typically features a minimum of five different applications, ranging from Customer Accounts, CRM, Product Information and Payment systems to Legal & Compliance scripts, Quotation systems, Insurance Claims and calls on data stored in sister or acquired company applications. This figure doesn't even include standard office applications that add to the complexity, such as email, Web browsers and word processing systems. Research from analyst firm ContactBabel suggests that non-value activities such as basic system navigation and data collection now accounts for 31 per cent of overall call times.
As consumers we're all familiar with agents who tell us that the 'system's running a bit slow today' or that 'we don't have your record to hand', but the reality for most major financial services organisations is that their multiple applications simply aren't sufficiently integrated to allow agents to do the job they're asked to do. It's one of the reasons why it's not surprising that financial services contact centres have the second lowest caller satisfaction rating out of all sectors according to a recent ContactBabel survey. Effectively agents are being left to handle application integration during the call, and it's not unusual for what seem like simple tasks to involve five or more separate applications, 20 different process steps and nine system swap-overs. Clearly that presents lots of opportunity for error, and this probably explains why up to 50 per cent of agent training time is spent on basic IT tasks rather than on customer service skills.
However, we have to recognise that in today's ultra-competitive financial services market, defined by globalisation and consolidation, the financial services applications landscape is likely to get more, rather than less complicated. So if financial services contact centres are looking for an answer to their over-complex agent desktops, it's going to have to be an approach that doesn't compromise their existing core business systems, and which effectively de-couples the agent interface from existing front and back-end systems.
30 Per Cent Agent Productivity Improvements
By detoxing the agent desktop or streamlining the number of different IT applications that financial services agents have to work with banks and insurance companies can create a new generation of clean and intuitive desktops and potentially increase their agent productivity by an average of 30 per cent. Using some of the latest user interface and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) techniques, the Intelligent Desktop can help organisations to optimise their agent user interface and implement best practice templates to speed up operational processes.
An Intelligent Desktop starts by mapping the customer experience and the agent experience, and then designs composite, role-specific agent desktops that can be easily tuned to each organisation's own requirements. For financial services organisations, for example, process templates can be created that deliver the exact sequences of agent steps needed to ensure regulatory compliance, or that highlight the optimum timing for cross- and up-selling effectiveness. With this approach the focus is always on increasing the ratio of 'value' to 'non-value' components of interactions, and providing financial services organisations with the components needed to offer a consistent customer service view.
A Typical Intelligent Desktop Solution For Financial Services Would Comprise Of:
About Adam Faulkner:
One of the four founding Directors of Sabio, Adam is responsible for developing the company's sales and service delivery. Before joining Sabio, Adam spent three years developing international operations for telecoms hardware reseller, Touchbase Communications. Earlier in his career he worked for two and a half years for IBM's Professional Services business.
About Sabio:
Sabio Group is a global digital experience transformation services provider with major operations in the UK (England and Scotland), Spain, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and India.
The Group delivers solutions and services that seamlessly combine digital and human interactions to support outstanding customer experiences.
Through its own technology, Sabio helps organisations optimise their customer journeys by making better decisions across their multiple contact channels.
Published: Friday, December 7, 2007
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