Automating Banking & Fintech Contact Center Operations with Ozonetel
Dinesh V
Oct 16, 2023
BANKING & FINANCIAL SERVICES, CALL CENTER AUTOMATION, FINTECH, SELF SERVICE
Before we start, If you haven’t grabbed your copy of State of CX Report 2021 yet, here it is. The report has insights from 150 million+ calls with the trends the CX landscape across the industries will witness soon.
The Banking and Fintech industry has been under tremendous pressure to cut down costs and improve productivity lately.
Now, your manager wants you to convert more. Upper management wants you to retain more. Your peers want you to do more, and your customers want you to care more. So, being a call center manager or customer experience officer, your job is more complicated than it seems.
A Gartner survey reports, 81% of companies compete mostly or entirely based on CX, making CX a critical competitive differentiator for financial institutions in 2021 and beyond. So, you may not show your cards, but you need to have a proper game plan for the pandemic-hit consumers who are more impatient than they were ever before.
So, if you think the post-pandemic shift in consumer behavior is a blip, well, think again.
According to a study, after a poor communication experience, 38% of customers will switch to a competitor or cancel services, 66% will tell about it, and 41% will stop doing business with a company altogether.
However, you’re not here to get scared by the numbers. But for the silver lining.
Customers of BFSI sector & Their Endless Demands
Traditional banking and financial activities are dying a slow death. Consumers are increasingly digital-savvy now, and the onset of COVID-19 has accelerated it further. While the older generations have now slowly started to trust the power of digital banking, millennials and GenZ are looking for seamless, omnichannel service with anywhere, anytime banking experience.
Customer: Hey, 12 minutes waiting time? You serious?
Agent: Sorry for the long waiting period…
Customer: (cuts him out) Listen, I am in the middle of making a payment on your website. But I want to make the payment from XYZ wallet, and it’s not showing here. I need to make the payment now.
Agent: I am afraid we accept only cards from the mentioned banks. We don’t support the XYZ wallet.
Customer: But I don’t feel safe sharing my card details. How come you don’t have an option of payment through a wallet? So, I approximately wasted 14 minutes of time that led me to nothing!
End of the story: Customer hangs up. Halt the payment. Takes the issue to Twitter.
The above is a typical example of demands made by GenZ customers. The BFSI contact centers and agents handle innumerable calls, even post banking hours. So, while each conversation is either a selling opportunity or a scope of upselling from the business perspective, the contact centers are left with the most critical task, i.e., conversion.
Why does BFSI need Call Center Automation more than anyone else?
It is understandable that customers of the banking and fintech companies are naturally anxious because it’s related to their hard-earned money. So, irrespective of how silly a query is, agents have to answer them with a straight face and patience.
With technological advancements in self-service technologies, customers can now handle many basic issues and transaction activities on their own. So, contact center agents are now expected to converse deeper and convert faster. Complex interactions like loans and mortgages need deep agent involvement, and financial organizations need their agents to be persuasive with a clear understanding of core business processes. Moreover, agents need to identify every cross-sell and upsell opportunity in real-time to orient their conversation accordingly.
So, understandably, the critical environment of a BFSI contact center needs to keep the mundane, redundant, and time-consuming back-office operations at bay and strive for more meaningful conversation, especially from high-intent calls. And there, the role of automation comes.
How Ozonetel Automates Core Financial Call Center Operations?
1. Self-service IVR
Self-service Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a speech recognition, AI-based telephony feature that helps identify, segment, and route callers to suitable agents. According to Forrester, about 79% of customers would rather self-serve than using human-assisted support channels.
Pro Tip: Ozonetel’s self-service IVR allows customers to solve their own queries and automatically gathers and displays customer journeys. With 70+ reports and analytics features, decision-makers can have a nuanced understanding of each customer action and most importantly, where the customer is in the buyer journey.
2. Customer Authentication & Notification
According to a finding by Statista, banks’ technology spend will hit nearly $300 billion in 2021 alone.
In an era where customer convenience is the foremost concern, additional layers of security sometimes add friction to the overall customer experience. Keeping that in mind, Ozonetel offers an omnichannel notification system that allows banking and financial institutions to both authenticate and notify users in real-time through missed calls, SMS, WhatsApp alerts and more.
3. CRM Integration & Data Automation
2 in 3 companies integrate their contact center systems with CRM, a study reveals. Primary reasons are streamlined data management, smooth data flow across systems, advanced analytics to keep track of customer journey and pitch the right service at the right time. Agents also spend less time on manual data entry.
With Ozonetel, financial agency call centers eliminate manual telephony functions such as putting calls on hold, call transfer, and call conferencing. With Ozonetel’s CRM integration, your agents have a 360° view of the caller data, their history, upselling opportunities, and more, right on the screen. Also, the auto logging of call data into CRM eradicates time-consuming manual input. So, your agents are well-informed and on top of their job.
Ozonetel integrates with leading CRMs such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Freshdesk, Zoho, and more. With a unified view of customer data and click-to-call functionality, connectivity is faster, and conversations are more personalized. You can integrate credit management systems, loan management systems, core
banking systems with Ozonetel and thrive on the telephony capabilities for seamless inbound and outbound communication. Learn More
“As a brokerage company, we want to simplify lives for our customers and agents alike — and Ozonetel’s call center solution has really come through for us. Customers auto-connect with their personal brokers, a Slack integration eased queue management, and the Hubspot dialer integration has amped up agent productivity.”
– Jason Richter | Director of Operations at Life Shield
4. Quicker Survey & Feedback
According to a study, 69% of customers cite poor services as the primary reason for leaving a bank, with 56% indicating the bank could have changed their mind if any attempt had been made to salvage the relationship. Banking and Fintech call centers are so busy resolving queries one after another that post-consultation feedback often goes for a toss. Blame it on the volume of calls or ignorance towards customer experience; the reality is collecting customers’ feedback and acting upon it is not a frequent phenomenon in the BFSI sector.
Ozonetel’s IVR blaster is an engaging way for service-obsessed organizations to survey user groups or get customer feedback on a product or service. Financial agencies can collect inputs via DTMF, call recordings, or natural language processing and drill down the information further to derive potential revenue opportunities.
Suggested Read: Get your self-service strategy right: practical tips from CX experts
5. Automating Collection Calls
Research data suggests that to convey 1,000 collection messages, you need to make 2,500 calls. This means that to get a live connection, you must dial an average of 2.5 times. And after that, customers rarely answer on the first try! Reasons like customers asking for a callback, noncooperation, or wrong numbers mean that almost 60% of the connected calls don’t serve the intended purpose. This is a significant drain on time and manpower.
Auto-dialers are a great option to automate collection calls to improve the wastage of precious agent time and boost productivity. Auto dialers from Ozonetel with Predictive and Progressive dialer support have proven to reduce individual agent workload by 60%. Also, agents can set call dispositions like no answer, call back, the wrong number for each call through an easy dropdown.
Moreover, financial agencies can reduce the cost of customer coverage by 65% using AI-based collection bots. By creating custom call flows, collection bots can gather helpful information and route them back to CRM basing on which live agents can prioritize calls, orient the tone of the ring, stick with specific schedules of collection tasks, and more.
6. Secure Communication and Data Protection
While technological advancements meant for user security are undeniable, fraud tactics are also alarmingly high. Remember that a transaction-related mistake is fixable, but you are putting the whole business at risk if you cannot protect your customer data. To eliminate fraud and do so faster is essential, and the BFSI sector needs the best form of the services than anyone.
Number Masking from Ozonetel is a powerful tool that enables agents to receive and make calls to customers while keeping both of their data private. It’s instrumental in the financial sector as more than 83% of conversations contain sensitive information about customers. Be it voice call or chat; on Ozonetel’s cloud-based platform, sensitive customer details are encrypted end-to-end and protected through Ozonetel’s own server. Moreover, all calls are auto-recorded and accessible on-demand for verification, review, and training purposes.
7. Conversational AI
Creating a superior experience requires not only faster service but also deep personalization. According to a survey, 90% of interactions in banks will be automated by 2022 using chatbots, with $7.3 Billion of the operational cost will be saved using chatbots in the banking sector by 2023. So, it would be best if
you had a technological intervention to cater to the thousands of users visiting your website with innumerable redundant queries.
AI bots are now in tremendous demand among banks to create a customer journey, increase customer acquisition, conversion, and retention rates.
Customers can report probable fraud on their debit or credit cards, request to increase their credit card limit, or get a drill-down of their recent transactions on chat interfaces. Bots can automate tasks and fulfill customer needs 24X7 with less friction.
Ozonetel AI bots are built on keeping the nitty-gritty of a contact center in focus, automates the right conversations, intelligently routes high-intent calls to live agents while being empathetic and human.
Moreover, Ozonetel offers FAQ bots to handle routine queries, account bots to manage account and transaction-related questions, and payment bots to address, remind & confirm payment-related queries. Conversational AI from Ozonetel redefines customer engagement, providing more convenience, self-service, and personalization.
8. Omnichannel
Move over multi-channel. It’s time to go omnichannel. The demands of customers for any time, anywhere banking has caused an explosive growth in the customer touchpoints, and banks & financial services have now realized that this digital proliferation will only increase from here on.
Banks need to utilize different channel analytics to capture the intent behind interactions across channels and automate the touchpoints in the buyer journey. Agents need to be trained, dispositions must happen faster, the conversation needs to be personalized and streamlined to avoid any fragmented customer experience.
Pro tip: Today, the fierce competition has compelled banks and the fintech landscape to have a nuanced understanding of user behavior through omnichannel touchpoints. The objective is to capture intents, derive insights, and optimize conversations. Learn Omnichannel Routing
Automation with Ozonetel at a Glance.
Loyalty & trust – it’s all down to the CX
For the banking and fintech industry, an attrition rate as high as 25-30% is not uncommon. But, If banks and financial services can learn to identify at-risk customers and proactively engage personally, retention won’t be difficult; perhaps they can keep the customers for life. So, it’s high time you equip your contact centers with cloud-based capabilities and modern tools. Because customer success starts at the agents’ desk and customer satisfaction is only achievable when your agents are happy and productive.
Do you know HDFC bank, ClearTax, Enterprise Capital, and 2500+ companies trust Ozonetel for their telephony requirements? And the best part is with open API architecture, you can build a contact center solution tailored to your own needs. Schedule a Demo now and unlock a 21-Day Free Trial today.
