Omnichannel Customer Engagement Must Consider the Branch or Store Employee
When a customer walks into your branch, they may have a simple transaction to complete, or be interested in learning more about getting a mortgage. Whatever the reason that prompted them to visit a physical location, today’s consumer expects that their bank can help them—and that they can continue a journey that may have started with a call into the contact center or a visit to the website. Perhaps the issue is more complex than can be completed through an online or self-service channel.
Many financial institutions have fully developed their multichannel approach to banking and can do it very well. By definition, multichannel means that a customer can interact with a company on multiple channels—assisted or self-service. And, in the case of retail banking, insurance, retail and some other industries—also in a physical store or branch.
This usually works just fine for routine transactions, as well as any request that is initiated and completed in the same channel, often during a single interaction (or online session).
Unlike multichannel, however, omnichannel considers the customer journey and the transitions that sometimes need to occur between channels, and in this case, resulting in a visit to the bank branch. The potential for a great customer experience in this face-to-face, human-to-human interaction is very high—but can only be achieved if your branch employees are equipped with the information they need.
Organizations need to ensure that context, customer data, history and consistency are maintained between the virtual and physical world for a high-quality customer experience.
Does that seem like an insurmountable hurdle? It doesn’t have to be. By using an employee desktop that consolidates multiple customer channels, account status, and previous customer engagement history, and a comprehensive knowledge management system that can suggest articles or other reference content specific to the particular topic or need, your bank can make it easy for your customer to do business with you through your employees.
And, you can help your employees provide a personalized customer experience to help not only retain that customer—but to also grow their accounts and balances on deposit.
The same employee desktop solution and knowledge management can also be used by contact center employees when they work with customers on the phone, providing important history on a customer’s interactions so that they don’t have to repeat themselves over and over—and the information needed to provide a consistent and high-quality customer experience.
Financial institutions (and other organizations) can also make this knowledge base available through their website to help digitally inclined customers answer their own questions or get additional information through web self-service.
By appropriately leveraging the data you have about your customers—as well as sharing content to proactively provide responsive answers to questions—you can use technology to equip your employees across the branch and across the enterprise to meet the needs of today’s customers. If you don’t, one of your competitors likely will.
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