Financial service leaders reveal call center challenges
Addressing call center challenges is key to maintaining strong customer relationships. Your call center is the primary point of contact many customers have with your business, especially during uncertain times. So, pinpointing the challenges within it reveals the biggest opportunities to improve call center performance.
The financial services sector includes banks, credit unions, financial advisors, investment firms, credit card companies and debt collection agencies–all services pertaining to the customer’s financial well-being. It should come as no surprise, then, that reaching a high-functioning call center is even more important to customers when they need to reach a business in this industry.
These survey results from 100 financial services contact center leaders (and 200 contact center leaders in other industries) outline the biggest challenges a successful call center must overcome. The most pressing issues include:
- Technology. Lacking the proper tools and/or interface call center agents need to do their jobs
- Staffing. High attrition and insufficient staff to meet the demand
- Integration. Inability to integrate between applications and across departments
This graph breaks it down:
Biggest challenges
The top challenge identified specifically by the financial services industry is “desktop tools.” Without the right tools, like an intuitive agent dashboard and a unified CRM, it’s next to impossible for agents to provide best-in-class service.
But technology is far from the only challenge plaguing contact centers in 2022. Here are some of the other top obstacles contact center leaders are working to address.
Remote work
Two years into the pandemic, most organizations have grappled with remote work in one form or another, but growing pains persist. On top of enabling work-from-anywhere access for agents, financial services call centers face the added challenge of maintaining security and meeting compliance requirements with a dispersed workforce. Digital transformation is necessary to meet the demands of busy consumers while simultaneously mitigating risk.
Agent attrition
This challenge is nothing new; it’s been a persistent one for call centers pretty much since the invention of the telephone. However, the solution that top contact center leaders have found is a novel one: focusing on the agent experience. A better agent experience drives more positive outcomes for customers by reducing average handling time, but it also makes for happier agents who are less likely to leave their jobs.
Customer engagement
Financial services customers are demanding, especially the high-value ones. If they receive sub-par service from your firm, they’ll quickly take their business elsewhere. Contact center leaders must deploy solutions that allow them to offer engaging, highly targeted experiences that savvy customers expect.
Top priorities
As for priorities, financial service call center leaders cited “improve employee engagement” as the number one item on their list. As we touched on a moment ago, highly engaged call center agents are not only better at their jobs, but are more satisfied with them, too.
Some of the other top priorities for contact centers across industries are:
Self-service/Automation Options
Customers want to help themselves, and contact centers can empower them by investing in tech that makes it easier to do so. This includes interactive voice response that allows callers to engage with automated systems in a more human way, intelligent routing that directs customers quickly to self-service tools, and smart chatbots that tackle frequently asked questions with ease.
Reporting and analytics
This multifaceted priority has the potential to impact nearly all of a call center’s operations. Insight-rich, easily accessible analytics can help call centers monitor the quality of their interactions, score their agents on key performance indicators, provide more targeted agent coaching, and increase operational efficiency. Financial services organizations can tackle the important compliance piece by pairing robust reporting with quality assurance software.
If you struggle with these challenges and identify similar priorities for meeting these challenges, we want to make this easy for you. LiveVox has created one unified solution that addresses the gaps in unintegrated financial services contact center software.
We know you’re busy, so we created our platform to provide everything you need to improve both agent and customer satisfaction, lower costs and increase ROI. We want you to check “complete, state-of-the-art contact center software solution” off your list, so you can attend to the next thing.
Our software includes the omnichannel agent dashboard and employee engagement tools needed to bring optimal performance to your contact center:
- Cloud-based software for full integration and flexibility, while eliminating costs of IT, hardware and software updates, storage and maintenance.
- Suite of self-serve options, including feature-rich and flexible IVR, callback options, smart routing, chatbots, knowledge base access, and ticket filing. Self-serve reduces queue wait time and increases the number of customers per hour each agent can comfortably handle.
- Sophisticated performance tools, analytics, and reporting, including call recording and screen recording, making call center managers more efficient and effective.
- Omnichannel integration, allowing voice, email, SMS, and chat to be used seamlessly together and with databases of customer profile and support information.
- Integration of CRM, WFO and Omnichannel in our one-stop solution to improve customer experience, increase personalization of calls, and improve retention of staff.
- Court-validated compliance tools built into our software, including 3rd-party certified PCI compliance. Our tools manage risk with respect to various statutes and standards including FSCPA, TCPA, PCI, DSS, and FCRA.