The old fashioned way of banking is to know your customers, greet them when they arrive at the bank, and you know beforehand what they are there for. This is what makes customers prefer a particular bank and branch – because they know the tellers and managers, and expect fast and efficient service. The question is, how do you scale this and provide the same personalized experience for every single customer across every branch in your network?
Omnichannel software starts engaging your customers from anywhere, using any device (SMS, website, social media, phone, etc.). It’s not just about reducing wait times. It is branch transformation by means of customer identification and personalization of service that is making banking jobs easy.
1. Psychology of reduced wait times
When you make customers wait for service in a branch for 20 minutes or more, the perceived wait time becomes more of a factor than the actual time. An irate customer called by a teller after waiting for half an hour is likely to make your job much harder.
On the other hand, a customer with an SMS ticket and scheduled appointment time arrives just in time, is polite and cooperates with your staff, and makes their lives a lot easier.
2. Multi-service counters
Omnichannel software with centralized administration gives you the ability to dynamically add more service counters for a service that has more customers waiting. A teller capable of handling multiple services can be switched from one service to another to handle waiting customers. This makes best use of the capabilities of each employee, while also ensuring consistent service for customers.
It makes the administration easier as well, since each function or service provided by a bank branch is clearly mapped out against all the available employees who can fill that role.
3. Customer identification
Every existing or potential customer who schedules an appointment through an Omnichannel system has provided you their name, contact information, and reason for wanting to visit the branch. This is a goldmine of customer identification that can make banking a breeze. Notifications are sent to the teller and customer to prepare for the meeting, keep the required documents ready, and arrive just in time for personalized service that would otherwise be available only to a handful of elite customers.
The teller gets to see the customer’s past transaction history, learn what kind of services the customer needs, and what recommendations should be made for the current meeting, based on their past history.
4. Load management
When a customer asks for a particular service from your bank, the Omnichannel software can instantly calculate which branch is the best option. This will be based on a comparison of the number of tellers providing this service at each branch, the number of people waiting at each branch for this service, and the distance of the customer’s current location from each branch.
At peak hours and on days when there are crowds of customers waiting to be served, this kind of load management coupled with multi-service counters go a long way towards making life easier for bank staff by distributing customers across your branches.
5. Real-time SLA breach alerts
As a financial services provider, you will have set service level agreements (SLAs) that dictate how long you can make customers wait for a specific service, how long it takes for an employee to process a particular proposal, and other such parameters. Normally, it would take days for an SLA breach to reach your desk, and for the response required through proper channels to reach the customer in question. But an Omnichannel system can send out real-time SLA breach alerts to those who can fix it right there, such as a supervisor or branch manager, or a regional or zonal administrator who controls the entire branch network from a centralized control room.
As soon they start receiving notification of breach alerts for a specific service, branch or region, they can dynamically allocate more resources to it. Branch managers can start talking to the affected customers, and keep them informed about their status. These alerts will help you do your job on time, and ensure quick resolution of SLA breaches.
6. Employee, branch, service and group level reporting
Apart from SLA breach alerts, Omnichannel software can produce detailed reports about every service and branch performance. You can use a live floor view to see how many people are waiting, how long they have been waiting on average, and a benchmark comparison of such metrics against group performance and/or targets that been set.
These metrics give you an idea of what service areas and KPIs at which branch need improvement, more resources, changes and/or additions to staff, skills and training, etc.
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