“Customer service” is the most frequently used keyword used by banking customers and it’s been obvious that this keyword was tied to both the highest and the lowest sentiment scores, meaning that service can largely determine if someone is disgruntled and angry, or surprisingly pleased.
For banking institutions, there’s also fewer in-person touchpoints with the customer, as many transactions have moved to mobile, and banks actively encourage people to use the ATM’s expanded functions or transact online. But people still use the phone when they have questions, and they expect competent and speedy answers. However, there’s opportunity for vast improvement within financial services providers’ call centers as well as their other channels of communication such as email, chat, or social.
Poor customer care results in multiple bad outcomes for financial service firms. Losing customers is costly, as there’s considerable marketing and sales efforts that must go into acquiring new “replacement” customers. To remain competitive, financial service providers have to adopt new tech-driven tools and adjust their business models to keep customers engaged and satisfied.
Performance Evaluations of Every Interaction
Financial services firms know they need to improve individual agent and department-level performance, but unfortunately there’s not typically enough available data and insights that inform this improvement. Consider the typical call center’s method of conducting performance reviews. A supervisor will manually “listen in” on only a few of an agent’s calls per month which typically works out to less than three percent. This not only results in an inaccurate view of agent performance, it does not reveal the insights that can be found in the other 97% of agent-to-customer interactions.
An elegant solution can be found with new tech solutions that transcribe 100 percent of call recordings into searchable text. By turning speech into text, these solutions can then develop analytics that provide managers with entirely new layers of insights. Such solutions can gauge not only an agent’s ability to follow compliance and sales scripting, but also their empathy and tone.
Supervisors can identify agents that are ending calls too quickly, or using confrontational language with the customers. Using analytics means call centers can spot and fix negative behaviors while also promoting positive actions to create a feedback loop of agent improvement.
In the broader context, access to such analytics provides a business with valuable information about how it is viewed by the average customer.
Context-Based Coaching with Analytics
A company that records 100 percent of interactions can provide agents with accurate and repeatable data that’s tied directly to the individual. Armed with this data, the supervisor can provide truly personalized training. Perhaps the analytics shows the agent knows all of the right compliance language, but does not show enough empathy on difficult phone calls. The supervisor can have the agent skip a compliance training session and instead more efficiently spend time working with them one-on-one to develop more empathetic phrases and tone. And since these analytics platforms can present data in near real-time, the coaching can also be adjusted dynamically to account for the actual “on the ground” conditions.
