Meeting customer needs at every touchpoint within the bank

You can track trends, gain insight on technology optimization and hear about market-tested practices all focused on the customer in the June BAI Executive Report, “Elevating customer service across the enterprise.”

Banks know they can no longer relegate customer service priorities to the contact center alone. They must offer smarter service earlier in the customer journey and wherever customers choose to do business.

Opportunities to engage directly with consumers might be scarcer in our digital banking world, so no interaction can be a wasted interaction. Although, it goes without saying that those digital exchanges should bring their own level of care and consistency.

Luckily, it’s increasingly the digital landscape and the data footprints left behind that shed more light on how customers transact and prefer to solve issues. Digital intelligence is also helping our industry identify efficiencies when migrating customer service from the branch to the phone to an app and back again.

With all that in mind, June’s BAI Executive Report, “Elevating customer service across the enterprise,” certainly hasn’t forgotten the contact center. We grabbed some time with Simmons Bank’s Nick Kieffer for a Q&A titled “Invest in talent and you’ll invest in customers.” Nick leads customer service across that organization’s 230 financial centers in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.

Perhaps nowhere else in the bank than in the contact center are soft skills and tech prowess so necessary and do they work so interchangeably.

As Nick describes, “I have believed for years that the job of an agent is the hardest job in the bank. To provide great customer service, they need to know our processes and technologies, which each have their own unique user interface. Agents are then expected to interact with customers at a greater rate than almost any other role… and [customers] are often emotional before they even contact our agents.”

The quality of phone interactions, including the long-run health and confidence of the agent, are as important as ever, research shows.

According to Pablo Arias, a cognitive scientist, people can actually “hear smiles” — and respond in kind. Smiling makes us subconsciously adjust the pitch and cadence of our speech to match, like how the register of our voices lowers and our speech slows when we’re feeling down. If we can hear someone smile in their speech, customers on the phone will hear when your agents are smiling.

Nick has some smart ideas for keeping agents and customers smiling. But his Q&A isn’t the only piece in the June issue that dives into human motivation.

Our lead article, “’The persona touch’: Can customer profiles forge deeper connections and grow deposits?” explores how data and generative artificial intelligence are revamping the use of personas to create more targeted banking interactions that lead to better customer service, cross selling and improved deposit health.

The key to modern personas, says FNBO’s Don Elliott, is a design based on life-driven events over pure demographics. “For instance, one persona is someone who is just starting to gain financial independence and everything is a first for them… first job, first car loan, first apartment.”

The idea is that customer interactions become personal, not simply transactional.

Also in the June issue:

We look at how to “Nurture small business customer service by meeting unique needs.” Small business clients present an opportunity for banks to strengthen revenues at a time when higher interest rates and industry competition potentially lure depositors elsewhere. McKinsey estimates that small business banking could open up about $150 billion in annual revenue for the U.S. banking industry across all products—deposits, loans, cards, cash management and merchant services. That’s about 17% of the U.S. banking industry as a whole.

And we delve into findings from Aberdeen Strategy and Research for a snapshot that shows the smartest ROI comes from customer experience (CX) technology that connects all departments. As Aberdeen’s Omer Minkara writes in “AI and automation smooth your frictionless customer experience,” technology and convenience go together when delivering a frictionless experience for customers and employees. But competition means that banks must optimize each touchpoint to retain their business.

Finally, Jay Choi, chief product officer at Glia, rounds out the issue with a beneficial explainer on the differences between horizontal and vertical customer service SaaS. Let’s just say one is a much better fit for financial services.

Rachel Koning Beals is Senior Editor at BAI.