Customers are behaving differently. Agent’s jobs have changed. The amount and flow of data circulating in the contact center have increased. In this new era of customer experience, there are three problems financial services organizations are facing: omnichannel enablement, rising costs, and risk mitigation. In this article, we explore the newest CX Trends in Finance and Banking into 2023.

Financial services firms need to get creative with how they differentiate themselves in 2023. This means doubling down on customer insights. With shifts in customer expectations, there’s more pressure than ever to really deliver for your loyal base of repeat customers. 

This requires an understanding of who that base is made up of (omnichannel customer segmentation), what their preferences are (digital, self-service, AI), and what kinds of multidirectional journeys need to be laid out in order to keep them coming back.

Let’s take a closer look at these three pivotal opportunities facing financial services, and explore some of the solutions that are trending in 2023. 

Latest trends in CX technology for banking and financial services

There are a few key customer experience trends to be aware of that are currently impacting the banking and financial services industries:

Omnichannel banking

As digital banking options continue to grow, so does the need for banks to provide an omnichannel experience. This means that customers should be able to move seamlessly between channels (e.g., online, mobile, in-person) without having to start their experience over each time. In order to provide an omnichannel experience, banks need to have a clear understanding of each customer’s preferences and journey. Expect to see a continuous rise in omnichannel banking trends.

Personalization

In order for banks to remain competitive, it’s becoming increasingly important to personalize the customer experience. This means going beyond simply using a customer’s name in marketing communications, and really understanding their individual needs and desires. By personalizing the experience, banks can build deeper relationships with their customers.

How do you provide a seamless personalized experience for your customers? With an omnichannel stack. We might sound like a broken record, but implementing a blended omnichannel strategy ensures you’re meeting your customers where they are with all of their relevant information.

Data-driven insights

To provide a truly personalized experience, banks need to have access to accurate and up-to-date data. This data can be used to generate insights that can help institutions better understand their customers and make more informed decisions about products, services, and marketing initiatives. From agent performance data and conversation analytics to sentiment data and call tracking, your team needs access to the right information to improve operations.

Keep these three customer experience trends in banking and financial services in mind. As you look to the future, consider how you can use these trends to improve your own organization’s CX strategy.

Problem: Lack of efficiency in your contact center

So many activities need to be coordinated every day for a financial services contact center to function. In order for a center to thrive, though, those activities need to be completed as quickly and efficiently as possible.

One of the best ways to maximize efficiency in any organization is to recalibrate the systems and processes required to accomplish the day-to-day, which is why so many financial services firms make customer experience and efficiency a priority.

But not every process or business system is created equally. There’s data migrations to consider when using multiple tools, a patchwork of digital channels to orchestrate campaigns across, and high inbound volumes that keep phones ringing. In order for these processes to be efficient they need to be measurable, integrated, and minimize friction.

One of the biggest pains facing the industry in 2023 is the ongoing process of overhauling the business systems that keep customer interactions rolling. Disconnected channels and fragmented data are at the center of the problem. 

Solution: Omnichannel communication & CRM platform

How do you create unbelievably effective customer service teams?

There’s no doubt about it – in order to survive and thrive in today’s competitive business landscape, companies need to have a well-oiled omnichannel stack. This is the only way to provide customers with a consistent and satisfying experience across all channels. 

But what many financial services firms don’t realize is that their omnichannel stack can also be used as a lead generator, a customer and campaign segmentation tool, and the foundation for multidirectional, personal journeys. 

Seems too good to be true, we know. But it’s possible with one thing: Unified. Customer. Data. 

Your customer interaction data can tell you how well your teams are performing, whether your workflows are functioning optimally, and what roadblocks are keeping your organization from delivering the highest level of service–all key ingredients for efficient CX. Not only that, but well- orchestrated omnichannel campaigns are 250% more likely to convert a prospect into a customer.  

Unifying data across channels to break down support silos could help your teams achieve these four things faster: 

• Improve your brand reputation
• Enhance your customer experience
• Drive sales through service
• Create brand evangelists

Unified customer data is also key to increasing sales and customer retention rates and can help you identify improvements that lead to more seamless customer journeys. 

Without a foundation for unifying customer data underpinning your omnichannel stack, you may be missing important insights and opportunities to:

• Proactively engage with customers
• Reduce customer attrition
• Increase first-time resolution rates
• Reduce wait times
• Identify and share agent best practices.

Learn how you can leverage customer data and digital channels to improve the customer journey.

Problem: Rising staff and service costs for the financial sector

Costs are rising all around financial services organizations. Whether it be labor, technology, or customer acquisition, the dollar just doesn’t go as far as it used to. Because legacy tech and data silos reduce your ability to deliver personalized and proactive customer outreach, your bottom line is being impacted in more ways than you might think. 

Without a unified data platform that layers omnichannel communication, here’s what could be increasing customer churn and lowering engagement rates for financial service firms in 2023:

• Customers are receiving messages that don’t apply to them
• Agents don’t have a complete view of the customer’s account, lowering the quality of each engagement
• Instead of receiving proactive calls, emails, or SMS messages about a known issue, customers are forced to contact you
• You can’t identify what’s causing customer frustration, making it difficult to optimize performance.

On another cost front, there’s the matter of labor. A contact center’s largest cost is its agents. The hiring, training and retention of agents is incredibly expensive and the average turnover of customer-facing agent positions sits at around 25% quarterly. 

Yes, you read that right, there are some financial services contact centers that are churning through their entire frontline staff in a little over a year!

The total cost of the time, resources, and management intervention that contact centers are spending to have agents trained, retained, and succeeding completely eclipses the expense of investing in resources that will maximize customer happiness and support efficiency. So it makes sense that the first way to invest in your agent experience is to start with the technology that they use day-to-day. Your customer support software should meet, if not totally go beyond, all of an agent’s needs and also offer the ability to scale with the needs of your business as things change and flex.

Solution: AI, self-service and CX automation

When you have seamless system connections you can easily tap AI for greater omnichannel efficiency because an important component that makes AI strategies really sing is ready and easy access to data. 

To start, financial services firms can incorporate AI-powered knowledge bases in their contact centers as well as leverage their CRM to improve customer interactions, enhance the agent experience, and support automation.

As a CRM is a repository for customer data, a knowledge base is a centralized location to store information about processes and service tasks that can help customers fulfill support needs on their own. AI can leverage the information housed in your CRM and knowledge base to benefit your business.

Learn more about LiveVox’s purpose-built CRM

Artificial intelligence can be put to use for problem classification, routing, and even issue resolution. For example, conversational IVRs can do initial intake by capturing routine customer details in order to route callers to the appropriate agent. Those same IVRs can send SMS triggers that initiate digital self-service interactions with chatbots. 

Here are a few other ways financial services firms can deploy AI and self-service automation in 2023: 

• Virtual agents: Build virtual agents around single objectives like prioritizing high-volume customer inquiries and frequently asked questions
• Chatbots: Collect data from existing repositories like your CRM or system of record and personalize bot pick lists to maximize ROI
• Speech analytics and sentiment analysis:Perfect conversations and even perform root cause analysis for repeat issues with speech analytics and sentiment analysis that uses natural language processing and machine learning to create keyword maps and alerts. 

AI will enhance financial services contact centers in multiple ways in 2023 — from independent self-service capabilities that deliver an unprecedented level of speed, personalization, and efficiency to hybrid functions that layer virtual agents to augment live agent’s performance. 

AI is the biggest trend and has been for the last few years, and the data collected from your enterprise customer service is its driving force of its use.

Problem: Increasing and ever-changing risk, especially outbound

Compliance and risk management have never been more complex. Outbound compliance risk and financial services regulations protecting consumer communication is increasing. TCPA class action filings have gone up by 21%, with an average settlement of $6.6 million. 

As regulatory demands continue to increase, financial services firms are at risk of getting fined when there is a lack of clear insight into interactions with their customers or stringent policy-based compliance measures in place.

Solution: Built-in compliance checks

Help protect yourself from unwanted compliance risk with a service platform solution that offers compliance-focused omnichannel communication. 

Tools like the LiveVox Four Clouds dialing solution and patented Human Call InitiatorⓇ along with Secure Payment Capture capabilities apply a rule-based compliance layer on top of customer data. 

Learn more about LiveVox’s industry-leading risk mitigation capabilities

Because compliance controls are baked into the platform, when an agent takes an action, they are bound by the rules applied to a particular customer’s preferences and interaction history. Customizable agent desktops enable another risk mitigation measure by displaying only the customer information relevant to an agent’s workload or user-based permissions.