4 Ways Banks Can Create Value from Customer Service Data
For financial institutions, the customer contact center can be a treasure trove of valuable information.
During the day, I speak with banking executives who want to be as strategic and efficient as possible with their customer outreach. But when I go home, my mailbox, my email inbox and sometimes even my voicemail are filled to the brim with offers from financial institutions for products and services that don’t fit at all with my lifestyle or spending habits.
There’s no reason for banks and other financial institutions to blindly blanket their clients with one-size-fits-all offers. In addition to their customer’s spending history and other financial information, banks have access to customer service chat logs, emails, call recordings and social media interactions — all of which can provide valuable insights.
Here are four ways that financial institutions can leverage data from customer service interactions:
1. Precise Targeting
Advanced voice analytics allow for intelligent word-spotting of agents calls for coaching purposes. While text-spotting tools for chat logs and emails enable financial institutions to target customers with the right financial products, gauge customer satisfaction and schedule the right number of agents to maximize customer satisfaction. For example, a customer who tells a service representative that she is going to have a baby might be in the market for life insurance or a college savings account. Some customers may even state outright on social media channels that they’re shopping for a car or home loan, giving financial institutions instant leads — if they’re able to connect these multiple channels of data to the appropriate resource. This data helps achieve maximum revenue generation as well as customer satisfaction.
2. Improved Training
Just as advanced analytics can provide a window into customer needs, these tools can help banks monitor the performance of their customer contact center employees. If the workers are supposed to be promoting home equity loans, for example, but fail to mention those products on customer calls, managers may offer them additional coaching. Some analytics tools can even detect emotions, helping managers to identify employees whose calls have a tendency to result in unhappy customer interactions.
3. Market Forecasting
Researchers have recently discovered that a drop in pregnancies tends to predict economic recessions — suggesting that ordinary people use economic data from their own lives to make major decisions, even before a larger trend becomes known. Banks can take advantage of this sort of “wisdom of crowds” and analyze data from customer inquiries to predict which financial products will be in the highest demand months into the future.
4. Increased Satisfaction
It seems like obvious advice, but enough organizations fail to take it, that it merits mentioning: Customer service data can help improve customer service. While financial institutions are great at matching interested customers with loans and credit lines, they sometimes struggle to resolve relatively minor customer issues. Banks can — and should — keep track of contact center data such as hold times and repeat calls to ensure that their valued clients aren’t spending long periods of time in customer service purgatory. By crunching a few numbers, financial institutions can keep cases from falling through the cracks and prevent scenarios where small problems result in frustrated and unhappy customers.
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