The principal operational benefit of an omni-channel solution is to provide a seamless, 360° view of the customer, with the same complete, up-to-date information on that individual available to anyone at the bank who interacts with that customer — in person at a branch, by phone, online or via mobile chat, or by video conference.
Every interaction with that customer enriches the financial institution’s understanding of that customer’s needs, including interactions in which the customer provides information through a self-help solution. That information, in turn, enables the institution to provide more personalized and more satisfying service, as well as the opportunity to derive more value from each customer relationship through tightly targeted cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
There are two sides to the omni-channel banking story:
1. Customer acquisition
If the visitor is not a current customer, the bank will engage him on a web or mobile site. Someone looking at applying for financial service products on a mobile device typically will have questions. Adding self-service or chat functionality within a mobile website can increase mobile conversions.
2. Customer retention
If the consumer is already a customer of the bank, he probably will be using the bank’s mobile app or online banking application. Chat can be embedded in the app.
Chat can be proactive or reactive. An agent initiates a proactive chat when he receives a notification that a customer has arrived at the bank’s web site or is using the mobile app and is following a behavior pattern that indicates that the customer needs an assist. For example, the customer may have arrived at a page describing a product for which people tend to have questions, or seems to be viewing a sequence of pages that suggests confusion.
Reactive chat is customer-initiated. The site or app will have a persistent link clearly inviting the customer to launch the chat interaction. These links can be tuned – they may appear only on pages where customers have tended to initiate phone calls, or the link may be visible only during hours when chat agents are available.
Success metrics
Call deflection (reduced call volumes).
Adoption of self-service (customer service savings).
Breadth of adoption (for varied kinds of questions and issues).
Cost savings in call center overhead.
High Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
Higher conversion rates (customer execution of valuable actions, such as transactions, account openings, loan or policy applications, etc.).
Mobile no longer just enhances other business models. Mobile commerce is its own model and is accounting for an increasing share of the digital banking traffic. The typical mobile financial service consumer is likely to use a smart phone or tablet numerous times a day at what researchers call “mobile moments” — checking balances and managing accounts before breakfast, making purchases on the way to work and again at lunch, setting up a new account during an afternoon break, researching and applying for loans in the evening, and so on.
Researchers emphasize that mobile moments, unlike desktop digital banking experiences, can happen anytime and anywhere. This is the key differentiating feature of the mobile financial services phenomenon — having experienced the freedom of anytime-anywhere banking, those who adopted are likely to make it their principal way of consuming financial services.
For the marketer of those services, the times and places where an individual’s transactions take place (the “context” for those transactions) provide rich analytic data on that customer’s consumption habits, and can be mined to provide a personalized mobile experience.10 Personalization allows the bank or investment firm to provide better-focused advice, information and offers to that individual.
For adopters, the advantages go far beyond convenience. Mobile banking is a recent phenomenon, still only partially understood, and likely to lead to discovery of consumer needs and development of service opportunities never anticipated by marketers previously.
With DYCSI, your financial institution can make the transition to the digital era. Contact us to learn how.