When it comes to financial services, customers today expect a digital-first experience that’s not only quick and efficient, but also hyper-personalised and channel-agnostic.
How can financial services providers effectively meet these demands? To find out, Salesforce recently hosted a webinar on The Hyper-personalised Service Imperative – Consumers Make the Choice for Indian Financial Services Providers.
The session featured:
● Vasupradha Srinivasan, Senior Analyst, Forrester
● Anshu Kapoor, Senior Executive Vice President, Edelweiss Financial Services, India
● Abhishek Rai, Senior Manager, Solution Engineering, Salesforce
● Kiran Kumar Kesavarapu, Senior Director, Solution Engineering, Salesforce
Here are some key takeaways from the discussion:
Stay ahead of the customer’s needs
Customers increasingly prefer to engage with their financial services providers digitally than in a physical branch. In fact, the Forrester Analytics Consumer Technographics® Asia Pacific Financial Services 1 Survey, 2020 found that 64% of consumers across metro cities in India want to switch to digital-only financial services providers in the next 24 months.
Currently, most consumers use digital tools for transactional activities such as checking their account balance, or transferring funds. But they also want to do more—like using online chat to ask a question, or viewing a forecast of monthly spend, or disputing a transaction payment online. The demand is for a complete digital-first approach.
Consumers are also looking for more personalised services. The above-mentioned Forrester survey also found that 28%, for instance, want help improving their credit score, while 27% want to create a savings goal and track their progress.
These trends open up new opportunities to strengthen customer trust and loyalty. Organisations that act quickly to deliver hyper-personalised, digital-first service experiences will stand out from the competition.
Break channel silos to engage better with customers
Traditionally, customer lifecycles were divided into a pre-sales stage and a post-sales or servicing stage. Each had different channels for customer engagement. But today, the lines between these channels are blurred. Every customer touchpoint is both a sales and services touchpoint.
Take WhatsApp, for instance. It’s a great way to communicate marketing messages or sales pitches. But what if customers want to engage and raise a service ticket on WhatsApp? Are they enabled to do so? Similarly, social media helps capture and funnel customer issues to a call centre. But can it be used for actual issue resolution?
These questions bear consideration because customers expect to be serviced effectively on whichever channel they choose—whether that’s a website, mobile app, or call centre. The focus is on omnichannel service and first-contact resolution, not just first-call resolution. The faster that organisations can break down channel silos, the more effectively they can engage with customers.
Enable a 360-degree customer view to provide seamless experiences
Being digital-first or omnichannel isn’t just about having a brand presence on multiple digital channels. It’s about ensuring a seamless, hyper-personalised customer experience across all these touchpoints.
When customers switch from email to social media, or from a self-service portal to a call centre, teams must have updated, contextual customer data at every touchpoint to drive meaningful and personalised conversations.
Salesforce Service Cloud provides a single source of customer truth across channels. The solution integrates data from multiple systems to build a 360-degree view of the customer. This empowers the front line to stay on top of customer needs, and deliver contextual, individualised service at every level.
Pivot to insights for proactive servicing
Financial services providers have a wealth of customer data. And analytics can transform this data into valuable insights. For instance, they can help determine which digital channels a customer prefers to be engaged on, or what actions to suggest based on the customer’s financial history. These insights help elevate the customer service experience.
Insights and analytics are often run as a separate activity. But a better approach is to bake it into the servicing platform, so that it seamlessly becomes a part of customer engagement. When agents have a single view of all relevant insights, they can make better-informed decisions on what to recommend to customers, when, and where.
Even while working remotely, agents can use computer-telephony integration to extract AI-powered insights and recommendations based on real-time transcriptions of customer conversations. With these insights, they can boost customer satisfaction, and minimise call wrap-up time.
To find out more, watch the webinar The Hyper-personalised Service Imperative – Consumers Make the Choice for Indian Financial Services Providers
