The Current + Future States of Financial Services Contact Centers

In financial services, credit union and regional bank contact centers face challenges as they adapt to changes in technology coincident with rising customer service expectations. Customer behavior is continuing to drive this change. It can be overwhelming to consider how all customer contact departments need to evolve to care for this exponential rise in expectations. ConvergeOne and Avaya partnered with CatalystMR to conduct a study to:

Pandemic this, COVID that… enough already, right? The situation was supposed to be temporary, but is it really? Many organizations I’m working with now are in a planning phase, and they aren’t planning for everyone to return to the office.

As the world struggles with the fallout from COVID-19, all aspects of life are quickly changing. Millions of workers are now working from home or other remote locations outside of the normal security configurations of an office. Fraudsters are taking advantage of this disruption to actively steal information that they can monetize. In many cases, companies were not prepared to deal with a large work-from-home workforce, and when they transitioned their employees to remote environments, they mainly considered threats like phishing or cyberattacks.

What is that one question that you’re answering repeatedly, every day?

How can you effectively safeguard the information your customers entrust in your company, as well as protect proprietary material and data? Begin your journey to a more secure customer experience by following these six steps.

The “bad guys” don’t sleep.

Now that we’ve thought about customer engagement and satisfaction, and remote employees/contact centers, we should turn our thinking to strategy. None of us at this time know how long we will be working remotely, or when life will return back to a level of normalcy we had prior to March of this year. One thing is certain, especially during this uncertain time: employees and customers will have questions and requests outside of the norm we experienced earlier this year. Because of perceivably higher volumes of contact into your organization from both employees and customers, perhaps it’s time to think about how you can enable those elements in a mid-term strategy that you can maximize when we return to “normalcy.”

These are times that many of us have never lived through or previously had to adjust to. Children have been sent home from school and for many college students, the rest of the semester is now adjusting to an online format. As for employees, most of our clients are asking for ways to allow their employees to work remotely. Mostly, with contact centers, they are the first ones to be tackled. This blog provides thinking beyond the technical aspects needed for a successful transition.

Whatever you want to call it, we’re all “in it” right now and struggling to find a new normal for our daily lives. As far as our work life is concerned, companies around the globe have been working tirelessly to handle the demand, both from a customer side and an employee side. Although the examples represented below are not of a life-altering or threatening nature, they are used illustratively to provide guidelines on how we should be behaving with our customers during this uncertain time. We are all hopeful that the damage from this pandemic will be minimal and we will be back to normal soon. 

Raise your hand if you’re guilty of sending secure information using your cellular device. Don’t worry—we all do it, despite the inherent risk involved in transmitting sensitive information across cellular and data-driven networks. However, this could leave not only your organization, but also your customers’ personal information, at risk. Customers want to feel safe interacting with your business. A critical component of an excellent customer experience involves ensuring the safety of your customers’ data.