What is a contact centre?
A contact centre is a department in a company, which is made in charge of answering queries and reaching out to customers across all channels or customer touch points.
Is a call centre different from a contact centre?
Broadly yes. Call centres are usually focused on managing outbound and inbound calls for an organization. Solely focused on voice-based calls, call centres have become subsets of larger contact centres.
Contact centres have a much broader scope.
A modern financial institution’s contact centre operations will help the organization with THREE main types of customer outreach:
A. Customer Servicing
Query resolution
Issue resolution
Complaints handling and resolution
B. Marketing
Campaigns
Product Promotions
C. Sales
Cross-sell
Upsell
Each of the above types has benefited tremendously from innovations in contact centre operations.
A. Innovation in customer service via contact centres at financial institutions
A good new-age customer service solution will help a bank or any financial services company do the following FIVE things at the minimum:
Support multiple channels out of the box, to service customers: calls, WhatsApp, live chat, chatbots, and social media.
Automatically map a query/issue to the right agent on the right channel.
Show a 360-degree view of the customer’s past transactions and communication history with the bank/financial services company.
Allow integration with APIs so that queries can be answered without manual intervention, by directly speaking with the backend databases.
Track and show relevant servicing metrics such as average call handling time, customer satisfaction score, and the average cost per call.
Gone are the days when a company would only be able to service any one channel and de-prioritise the others due to a manpower crunch or other constraints.
B. Innovation in marketing outreach via contact centres at financial institutions
Until just a couple of years ago, marketing outreach via contact centres meant agents cold-calling people, and relaying the same message to every person, like shooting arrows in the dark.
In this day and age of technology that facilitates precision marketing through hyper-personalisation, sending one-size-fit-all-kind of solutions or campaigns doesn't work effectively.
FOUR ways how contact centre innovations in this space have brought efficiency and excitement in how banks, NBFCs and other financial institutions now conduct cold outreaches:
Banks, NBFCs and other financial institutions now no longer need to be dependent on cold calling. Newer channels like emails, web push notifications, app push notifications (APNs), and app inboxes are now being offered right from the start.
Newer contact centre platforms also offer the ability to hyper-personalise messages so that the same message is conveyed differently, tailored according to the recipient.
Not only that, but also we can change templates, UI/UX, and other cosmetic aspects on the fly.
AB testing with content and UI/UX is another powerful innovation that has increased financial institutions' capacity to get more juice out of their contact centres
C. Innovation in sales outreach via contact centres at financial institutions
Sales are hard. Doing so virtually, even more, so. There are FOUR innovative ways in which contact centre capabilities are making it easier for banks, NBFCs and financial institutions to sell their offerings to discerning customers:
Live coaching for sales reps - when sales reps get on a call, a modern contact centre platform analyses the potential customer’s emotion measures the agent’s confidence, and questions talk ratio and offer corrective nudges for the agent to get trained quicker.
Speech analytics - Speech analysis, or audio mining, is a new technology using which we can identify actionable insights from each agent’s call and help organizations understand what is working in a pitch, what is not working, what kind of topics are repeatedly surfacing in customer interactions, and at what frequency, etc. This helps financial institutions drive up NPS and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores while driving down average call handling times (ACHT) and drop-offs.
In-call support for sales reps - multiple studies have shown that agents lose crucial time trying to find answers to a potential customer’s queries. A modern contact centre platform parses through web pages, internal documents and folders, and throws up the right answers when the agents face a question they cannot instantly answer, thereby reducing the call handling time and increasing the overall call experience.
After-call work automation - Agents invest a lot of time in summarising the report after each call. With a good contact management platform, call summarisations can be largely automated, helping increase the productivity of each agent
While all of the above sound exciting and simple, the execution can be challenging. If you need clarity on any of the above, or help with implementation - reach out to us today at info@executepartners.com
Comments