Banking customer service: A guide

• Use AI
• Personalize service
• Connect experiences across channels and devices
• Deliver fast responses
• Deploy an online help center
• Translate data into business insights
• Use workflows and routing

• Provide more proactive support

1. Use AI to scale productivity and reduce costs

Take Coda Payments’ chatbot, which provides customers with the choice of interaction style that suits their personal preferences and type of query–whether that is having a complex issue resolved by speaking to a real-life agent or getting instant assistance with simpler queries from the bot. Agents are benefitting too: with fewer spam tickets and a decreased workload, they can spend more time providing quality service to customers.

“Before, about 60 percent of our tickets used to be blank or spam,” said Bharati Amarnani, Global Customer Support Director at Coda Payments “Now, that number has been reduced to 20 percent because the bot can help solve basic queries and filter out blank tickets before directing customers to a human agent.”

2. Arm associates with data to offer personalized service

3. Deliver a connected experience across channels and devices

The Zendesk Trends Report also found that 66 percent of financial services customers want help that doesn’t interrupt their current task, and 64 percent spend more when issues get resolved where they already are. Yet many banks don’t offer a clear support path across their digital channels.

Embedding support across channels and devices is one of the first steps to providing the consistent and connected experiences customers expect. For example, Coda Payments uses a unified agent interface to manage customer interactions across email, Facebook Messenger, live chat, Instagram, WhatsApp for Business, and LINE.

“With one unified platform on Zendesk, we can respond across multiple channels in one place, which is especially helpful when customers repeat a query on different channels,” said Bharati Amarnani, global customer support director at Coda Payments. “Ultimately, we want to be there as a brand to support our users. Our customers appreciate the ability to reach us via these different channels.”

4. Deliver fast responses to improve the speed-to-close of offerings

Responding to client inquiries with speed and agility is a high priority when handling financial transactions. Many banking consumers prefer to speak to a representative before making higher-stakes financial decisions—for example, when taking out a loan. Fast responses increase the speed-to-close of offerings, which has a direct impact on your bank’s bottom line.

Increasing the speed of responses requires having all customer information located in a single place, said Ben Chapman, Director of Client-Facing Experience and Analytics at Homebridge. That visibility helps the support team improve its rate of getting loans closed. Being able to reduce how long customers have to wait for mortgage approval also helps set the company apart from other lenders.

5. Deploy an online help center to deflect common questions and help clients navigate the financial world

A robust help center or self-service client portal can help deflect tickets for agents while ensuring customers have quick, 24/7 access to helpful information and answers. It can also be a great tool during customer onboarding to help clients learn how to derive the most value out of your products and services and navigate the financial world.

For example, Neo Financial designs self-service videos for customers which are posted in the help center and on YouTube, covering basic education and FAQs–Think: “How do I activate my card?” “How do I pay my bill?”

LendingClub is another financial services company investing in self-service. The team uses article ratings to ensure that help center content is meeting customer needs. The team also regularly updates content and pays careful attention to what search terms customers are using. As a result of this dedicated investment in content, LendingClub has established a self-service score of 11:1, meaning for every 11 visitors to the help center, only 1 ends up creating a ticket.

6. Translate client data into intelligent business insights

“Allowing customers to get the right answer on their own is very important. We’ve invested a lot in making sure that we offer a robust help center, and we’re constantly revising it,” said Andrew Jensen, Director, Payment Solutions at LendingClub.

When service teams have access to the right data, they can act as a feedback loop for business innovation and improvement.

Take it from Siemens Financial Services. With all its customer data living in one place, the team can easily analyze and create reports on ticketing spikes, which has allowed the executive team to make better data-informed decisions on how to respond in the future.

“Over the years, we’ve become a source of feedback for the rest of the business in terms of what our customers want, trends in the marketplace, and really key innovations,” said Steven Franklin, Global Head of Customer Service at Siemens.

7. Use workflows and routing to prioritize high-tier clients

8. Provide more proactive support

A Forrester Consulting survey of over 2,000 banking consumers and over 100 lending strategy leaders found that half of all respondents wished their bank took a more proactive approach to deliver relevant information and advice about their financial well-being. By integrating systems across the customer experience, banks can provide proactive advice and support at scale.

Take Homebridge. Proactive chats initiated by agents help to decrease the bounce rate of site visitors. The customer service team reaches out to visitors and asks them to fill out a simple form. In this way, agents are garnering valuable sales leads and helping accelerate the loans process.

Deliver top-notch banking customer service with these examples of good support from real financial services.

Starling Bank provides exceptional 365/24/7 customer service

Starling Bank, a British neo bank, runs a 365/24/7 contact center across various digital channels so customers can get help at any time, day or night. To streamline support, every agent has the skill to respond to any contact method. This makes it easy for people to get guidance managing their wealth where and when they want to.

Nubank empowers the support team to “WoW” customers

Nubank is dedicated to providing great support and “wowing” customers whether it’s over email, live chat, phone, or social media.

“A ‘WoW moment’ is when our agents go off script. We want to empathize with our customers and make a real connection, whether that’s solving a particularly complex problem, or just having a really nice conversation,” said Dennis Wang, Vice President of Operations at Nubank. “Agents can send customers a gift or handwritten note to follow up. They can decorate the box however they want and send it directly to customers.”

Northmill Bank challenges the status quo in banking with omnichannel, personalized, and scalable support

Northmill Bank is challenging the status quo in banking businesses with a fresh approach that creates personalized, transparent experiences for its customers. It provides a consistent, connected, and personalized support experience across its channel offerings, including email, phone, and live chat.

Support team leaders also measure agent performance across channels and teams. That has helped the team increase productivity as the business grows, enabling the neobank to scale its level of service.

In fact, its commitment to smart, personalized service has helped Northmill maintain a 90 percent CSAT score.

“We look at ourselves more as a tech company than a bank,” said Simon Nilsson, Chief Commercial Officer at Northmill Bank. “We take more of our cues from companies like Netflix and Spotify than we do from the big Swedish banks.”