6 Min
To help better the customer experience challenges, the banking company must know the needs and behaviors of its customers through the customer journey. Effortless and positive customer experience can cause increased loyalty, advocacy, greater customer lifetime value, and customer satisfaction.
With an increase in banking service fees, online payments all contribute to a shift in the methods of customer servicing of banking organizations. There’s an increase in organizations trying to poach away customers by providing a wide range of products. The banking sector companies must do something different to provide a superior, consistent, and effortless customer experience to gain a new customer base, or keep the existing ones, or win back the lost ones.
Table of contents
Challenges of Customer Service In Banks During Lockdown
1. Less Support agents and many customer queries
Because of lockdown throughout the country, none of the employees can work as they do normally.
All employees have to work from home or in shifts. Problems with the network, internet issues disrupt the work of the agents. There are job cuts because of budget issues and uncertain times. This results in fewer remote agents. The customers’ challenges increase because now the customers have to put more effort into solving their problems. They might not be familiar with creating customer service issues.
2. Reducing CSAT and FCR
Customer satisfaction is steadily decreasing because of the fewer number of agents and low query resolution rates. FCR has been decreasing steadily due to people shifting to the online mode of banking. Their queries increase because of the issues like network failures, internet issues, and complicated website issues. Complaint handling is one area where banks can improve immensely.
25% of Indian respondents were dissatisfied with their banks’ complaints handling, compared to 15% in the US and merely 2% in Singapore. The Banking Ombudsman report 2014-15, too, had recorded an 11% rise in complaints against Indian banks. Out of the respondents asked, one-third of the 1,313 respondents were not satisfied with their banks.
3. Increasing Average Handle Time
The purpose of AHT is to measure the average time customers and the agents help them spend on a call or chat, including hold time and conversation time to solve a query. If the number of agents present is less because of the aftermath of lockdown time, the time taken to resolve a ticket increases, increasing the AHT and reducing efficiency.
What can solve all this?
Self-service can reduce the customer experience challenges faced. Self-service allows you to provide online support to your customers, requiring no interaction with a representative from your company. The most common types of customer self-service include FAQs, Picture Guides, knowledge base, and online discussion forums.
Following are the benefits of self-service:
1. Address multiple queries at once
With self-service, organisations can work on multiple customer inquiries at a time because the agents cannot answer them. Because of FAQs, Picture Guides, knowledge base, etc, the customers can go through the queries themselves and resolve them. Ease of use is a key factor in creating solid customer engagement, especially when self-service kiosks are combined with other easy technologies, like cashless payments.
2. Expands customer choice and reduces AHT
The rising importance of self-service kiosks has been because of allowing self-service technology users to take on a more active role. This type of kiosk gives users more control. It also adds an element of co-creation to the customer experience. They also reduce the AHT because the agents are busy with only the queries, which are complex and weren’t resolved by self-service.
3. Improves customer retention and customer acquisition
Self-service eliminates the need for long waits to talk to agents. It instead offers an interactive solution that helps customers get things done when they want and how they want. This type of smooth experience can help keep and attract customer confidence. Especially those who are comfortable with technology and those who expect to find self-service options as a norm. Self-service technology also considers the preferences of more free customers who prefer to get things done or to find answers by themselves.
Conclusion
In conclusion, today’s customers are more than ready for self-service. But a customer self-service portal is only effective if you make it easy to use. To achieve this, the customer service knowledge base and FAQs need to be easily accessible, up to date with the use of images and videos. The organization is the needs a self-service portal.
And finally, all content within the self-service portal must be optimized for desktop, tablet, and mobile users. The customer can find information quickly when self-service is done right, reducing customer experience challenges. It also reduces the number of calls or emails your support team receives and leads to a greater customer experience, especially during the lockdown. And that is how you can overcome CX challenges in the banking sector and keep customers happy!
