3 min read
Businesses are driven towards an ever-growing customer engagement rate, promising an increased percentage of sales and operational productivity, across a wide area. The concept is backed by recent research, which proves that a brand is most likely to generate 23% of its revenue from customers that understand the product and are engaged as well as connected with the brand.
The term “Customer Engagement” refers to the strategy developed by a business to develop a connection and a lasting relationship with its customers, maintain loyalty and generate brand awareness.
Pushed by online retailers such as Amazon, customer engagement is vital to doing business online, which keeps increasing customer expectations. The consistent sharing of information about the launch of new products, discounts, and sales develops an interest and loyalty in the customer which is the primary objective.
There are so many strategies for businesses to embark upon for attracting customers using digital marketing. The digital space offers new opportunities to make brands shine by delighting customers with stellar experiences.
Quite similar to online businesses, financial services companies too, use various marketing techniques to maximize their customer engagement. Unlike online retail businesses, the touch points with the customers can be fewer hence requiring a careful approach in the configuration of these engagements.
Over many successful marketing campaigns of businesses, it has been proven that customer engagement is the constant nurturing of the relationship with the customer, far beyond the single transaction.
Within financial services, there are multiple touchpoints and stages, all of them critical for good engagement. From the initial stages when a new consumer is approaching a website for a custom quote on a product, to the stage when an existing customer is trying to claim money back or make a change to its product, it is essential to be ready to meet his or her expectations, to maintain loyalty and a positive feedback loop.
Over the years, we have created a list of the top 3 strategies that are most effective in providing stellar customer engagement for financial services firms.
Today customers expect to interact with brands how they want when they want. This builds trust and authenticity of the brand in the client’s mind. That said, offering various modes of communication, such as phone, email, chatbots, etc is always better for providing a memorable experience.
However, providing communication channels is not enough. Because of digitalisation, financial services companies are visible on the world wide web to a broad audience. To cater to different time zones, not to mention languages and cultures, it is essential to have capabilities available 24/7 to execute the services provided via such channels. Quality customer interaction is a must to earn trust and loyalty.
We understand how expensive, although essential might turn out to be. Additionally, a solid digital experience, along with the ability to answer technical questions right at the first digital interaction whether via webpages, FAQs, chatbots, or live chat, is crucial to be relevant in the eyes of the cusomter.
Opting for Conversational Process Automation equipped businesses with a robust approach to augment their operations by allowing self-serve for their customers on specific services.
Here is some feedback from customers collected by an insurer using the Spixii chatbots for a claims first-notice-of-loss process:
“Claim reported and started straight away, by chat, pleased with how easy it was”
“Logging a claim online has been so easy, I was really anxious at how difficult it would be. It is so much easier than an automated system logging over the telephone.”
“This type of contact has been useful as I tried to ring the office and it’s shut until Monday. I have been extremely anxious and upset today so being able to get in touch with someone has been really helpful”
Here is some feedback from managers of customer services for a large healthcare provider using the Spixii chatbots for pre-authorisation of medical claims:
“When the pre-authorisation bot when live, I could see our customer services agents being less under pressure.”
“Operating 24/7, we are now able to boost our productivity to deal with more requests with the same level of resources while delivering superior customer experience to our members by offering a powerful self-serve that save them a lot of time.”
Aspiring for customer satisfaction? Learn how Spixii conversational process automation can improve your customer engagement.
Every customer has unique needs. However, they all appreciate an interaction that is tailored to them that makes them feel valued, understood, and connected to the brand.
Offering the same journey to all visitors, generic online web forms cannot meet such requirements. While telephonic conversations usually provide personal and contextual experiences but at a very high cost to businesses. Emails and web live chats are often manned according to specific time zones, due to which queries are not answered promptly.
Every interaction with the customer bears the potential to nurture such a relationship, delighting through efficient and resonating experiences. In that regard, anything pertaining to brand personality from colour schemes to the tone of voice is of paramount importance. To build the desired relationship and brand image, explore Conversational Process Automation (CPA) and chatbots to automate such interactions at low costs.
Circling back to the claim FNOL example above, another interesting and rather amusing feedback collected through Spixii chatbots was (reporting original feedback with typos):
“I found the question related to the claim very strait forward and easy to answer. The person i was chating to made me feel very relaxed and calm.”
Apart from the fact that the person had the feeling of chatting with a real person, although she was in fact interacting with a chatbot - Turing test passed :) - such feedback comes about because of the quite empathic tone used throughout the chatbot conversational journey.
In order to improve customer experience, it is necessary to adopt a customer-centric mindset: the more you know about your customer, the better you can target your experience.
A centre of excellence allows for a continuous improvement loop based on solid feedback gathering and processing, supported by a flexible technological infrastructure and change management processes for quick iterations. When a good centre of excellence is implemented, biased guesswork gives way to a rigorous and scientific evidence-based approach. Or in other words, an informed decision backed up by powerful analytics.
Although survey-based measurement systems are (to date) the main source of insights, research from McKinsey shows their limitations while demonstrating how companies leveraging real-time data and analytics are reaping bigger benefits.
Conversational Process Automation, for example, allow collecting customers’ behaviour and feedback, ordering them in a meaningful graphical way to facilitate insights and allow quick process changes with a solid versioning system.
Quality customer interaction is the one that solves queries promptly. We define memorable as one that does it with elegance or surprise, exceeding customer expectations.
Customer interactions build most of your brand reputation. Therefore, knowing your customers in detail is clearly a competitive advantage.
Do you need help with removing the friction in your high-value services? Take the first step with Spixii’s performance assessment for customer-facing process automation now!