A game plan for financial institutions and credit unions, part 1: Simplified, successful client engagement

Part 1 of a 2-part blog series for Financial Services and Credit Unions.

The power of moving forward faster with agility, flexibility, and responsiveness

Investment firms, insurance companies, and other financial services institutions, including credit unions (FSIs for short), are often limited in their operational flexibility by their existing infrastructure and systems.

The reality is that many of these organizations feel unable to replace their core systems in a timely manner because of cost, proprietary technologies, or outdated data structures.

Hybrid helps things happen

This is where extending the life cycle of legacy telephony becomes a key enabler. A contact center platform that can connect to both your old platform and a more modern collaboration platform becomes the migration strategy you need.

A hybrid approach also lets organizations combine the best of old and new for as long as they need to.

Complementing legacy technologies with a flexible over-the-top (OTT) digital application layer minimizes operational disruption while letting organizations keep using the data in their legacy systems.

As a result, they can benefit from enhanced capabilities far sooner than a full replacement would allow.

Because this dynamic customer experience layer is loosely coupled with the core systems, new capabilities, including AI, can be integrated into the organization’s infrastructure far more easily.

Combining slow, steady, rock-solid legacy systems at the core with fast, innovative capabilities at the digital layer helps these organizations keep pace with market demands.

Omnichannel is the expectation

It’s a no-brainer. A fully integrated omnichannel approach is now the baseline expectation. A member may start an application for a new financial product, such as a loan, mortgage, or business line of credit, on their phone, continue it later on a laptop, and sign at the branch, without having to repeat themselves at any step. Clients and members must be free to choose whichever channel best meets their needs at any moment.

To complicate matters, client and member needs are never static. Financial institutions and credit unions that keep looking ahead will maintain a competitive advantage and benefit from the flexibility digital technology provides. Those that don’t, won’t.

“The hosted Contact Centre and Recording and QMS platforms were quickly implemented, enabling FECA to benefit from the flexibility of easily optimising advanced routing capabilities, call back and screen recording features as need changed. This increased service levels, eliminated unnecessary delays and/or call misdirection, resulting in reduced costs. Our older technologies severely limited our operational flexibility.”

Contact Center Leader at an International Logistics and Shipping Credit Association

Design, measure, refine, repeat

Designing and refining the omnichannel experience never stops, even after every project milestone is complete. It’s an ongoing cycle: create the best possible experience for today, analyze feedback and results, then keep refining and optimizing.

FSIs and credit unions should adopt the customer experience (CX) development approach used by leading digital platforms, often called “fail fast.” New capabilities are developed quickly and rolled out to the market. Adoption, usage, and feedback are then closely tracked and analyzed, increasingly with AI-powered analytics, to see whether each enhancement meets expectations. If it doesn’t, it’s refined until it does, or it’s retired.

Collaboration underpins everything

Underpinning everything is the need to improve communication and collaboration across the whole organization, so that clients and members are served quickly and their issues, needs, or requests are resolved correctly the first time.

Integrating a collaboration system like Microsoft Teams with the contact center helps organizations achieve better results more efficiently and effectively. Teams lets staff see who is available through presence indicators, then communicate and collaborate instantly through document sharing, video, chat, SMS, email, and calls. All channels should be fully integrated with your contact center and recording solutions. Tellers, loan officers, contact center agents, back-office staff, and executive decision-makers can work together wherever they are: in the branch, at home, in another office, or on the road.

Using a widely deployed platform such as Microsoft Teams means organizations can build on technology that’s already in place, with an interface employees already know. That means little or no learning curve, fewer adoption issues, and no unwelcome workflow changes.

“Consolidating phone, text, and email interaction with Microsoft Teams using Enghouse has greatly streamlined and enhanced our ability to communicate with our members faster and more effectively.”

IT Manager at a National Trade Credit Union

Keep it simple

If a solution isn’t intuitive (read: simple) and doesn’t deliver the expected capabilities or results, the client and member experience you’re trying to improve will suffer.

After too many disappointments, clients and members will leave. The right decisions will deliver the improvements you need while minimizing risk. Think of your technology choices as client engagement enablers, with a view to what you need now and how those capabilities, AI included, can evolve in the future.

Contact us to find out how Enghouse Interactive can help you simplify client and member engagement, or explore our financial services solutions.

Read the next post in this two-part blog series:

A game plan for financial institutions and credit unions, Part 2: Process modernization