4 customer engagement considerations for banks

In today’s competitive financial services industry, banks are striving to leverage every customer interaction for maximum conversion and revenue. Customer expectations have pushed the branch to a fundamental inflection point, financial institutions must rethink, reimagine and retool branches if they are to succeed.

Forward-thinking financial institutions are reinventing branches through digitalization. They understand the need to meet the growing requirements of omnichannel consumers and drive foot traffic into brick and mortar locations by moving consumers seamlessly from online to offline appointments.

As retail banks look to address the needs of the connected customer and evaluate online appointment scheduling applications, there are 4 critical criteria that demand evaluation to take your omnichannel strategy to the next level.

Let's dive in.

Criteria 1: Deliver a seamless customer journey

The key to driving omnichannel conversion is the delivery of a seamless customer journey. The journey should enable your customers to engage, book, and manage appointments across multiple channels with ease. Financial services staff require access to journey analytics to support evaluation of drop-off rates, conversion, and time spent per booking step.

Criteria 2: Gain staff adoption

A critical element to selecting the right customer engagement platform and gaining adoption is the staff experience.

The solution needs to be easy to use, providing staff members with vital insights at their fingertips. This frees up their time to focus on the interaction with the customer rather than the navigation or setup of the software.

The branch experience is also evolving, and requires support staff who are on the move. The UI should be tailored to different customer engagements. As an example, there should be an interface designed for the concierge experience of welcoming and managing customer flow through the branch, while a different booking interface should be built to manage the appointment and collect the outcome.

Finally, the experience needs to remove routine administration tasks through automation to deliver staff efficiencies and increase ROI. For example, using an AI-powered scheduling engine can dynamically match the right staff member and skill set to the right service at the right time at the right location.

Criteria 3: Analyze the performance

Booking performance, wait times, no shows, lead times, capacity utilization, staff performance, and business outcomes help evaluate the operational performance and customer experience. This rich insight helps to identify areas to improve and optimize.

Criteria 4: Fast time to market

The speed of branch transformation is not slowing down. Therefore financial institutions need to select a flexible platform that is:

1. Quick to implement
2. Secure, robust, and ISO accredited
3. Easy to manage with zero additional cost
4. A single platform with additional applications and integrations for future use cases.

The key to getting this right the first time is selecting a partner who is experienced in omnichannel conversion across the globe.

You may also like our 2019 Modern Consumer Banking research, which highlights what banks need to know to cater to today's consumer.