Partner Article

Financial services find cheaper ways to engage customers

A study into customer engagement by the financial services has shown that many will invest in ‘cheaper’ ways to engage.

The survey of 150 senior business and IT decision makers in financial services, from Aspect, shows that cheaper modes of communication such as instant messaging and web chat, and online self-service will be implemented in 2013.

Contact centres operating in the sector are planning to tackle the customer experience versus cost challenge by applying these technologies.

56% of respondents saw improving the customer experience as the a primary business goal, and 68% want to reduce cost by implementing new technology.

However, 60% suggested that capital expenditure was the biggest barrier to adoption of these new technologies.

Organisations were also found to be keeping compliance and data security absolutely at the top of their agendas, with 51% and 46% claiming these as top technology concerns respectively.

Peter Nicol, VP Northern Europe at Aspect, said: “Contact centres operating in the highly regulated financial services industry are presented with some difficult choices.

“Despite 94 per cent of respondents claiming that customer service is the primary objective, they aren’t just functional customer service outlets but real assets adding real business and strategic value, and not just in terms of sales.

“The research reveals some encouraging findings, particularly that only one in five respondents claim that being seen as a cost centre is a barrier to technology adoption.

“Understandably for financial services organisations, compliance, security, privacy are all top technology concerns for respondents.

“It’s a complex compliance landscape for contact centre managers; not only are they dealing with Ofcom rules on handling sometimes thousands of customer interactions a day, but also data protection laws and industry-specific regulations such as those from the Financial Services Authority.”

The research also indicated that organisations are getting better at squeezing additional value out of the contact centre through customer interaction.

Only 17% of contact centres currently use voice analytics, but it is one of the fastest growing technologies with a further 13% planning to implement it.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .