Marketing Conference Explores the Digital Customer Experience
By Leah Bateman, Project Manager
The Financial Services sector has been facing many challenges in recent years, with aggressive efficiency saving measures, large scale regulatory reform and lack of consumer confidence featuring highly on the list.
Increased competition due to seven day switching regulations introduced in 2013 means that Financial Service providers must better understand their customers’ needs and deliver against them if they hope to meet retention targets. The Winning Digital Marketing Financial Services Conference held in London earlier this month explored ways to meet these challenges.
A recent survey found that 72% of respondents who switched providers cited ‘overall poor quality of customer experience’ as the main reason for switching, while a ‘lack of customer service representative knowledge’ accounted for 36%.
The main customer service pain points reported were:
- Contacting customer service multiple times for the same reason (86%)
- Being put on hold for a long time (85%)
- Customer service agents who cannot answer the questions (84%)
- Repeating the same information to multiple customer service agents (83%)
- The company delivering something different than what they promised up front (83%) and
- Unfriendly or impolite customer service agents (82%).
So how can the industry meet efficiency targets whilst delivering a rewarding, informative customer experience designed to meet the demands of the digital customer?
The key points raised at the conference were:
- Mapping, evaluating and delivering omnichannel experiences
- Managing Social Media and Mobile channel interactions
- Understanding search behaviour and the digital journey
- Creating compelling, engaging content
With these points in mind, financial organisations must look to a combination of people and technology to meet customer expectations and reach retention targets. Creative Virtual has been providing Smart Help solutions for the Financial Services industry for over a decade, and our wealth of experience enables us to deliver award winning customer service tools to our clients. V-Person™ for Finance solutions, our omnichannel customer engagement solutions which we showcased at the conference, are designed specifically for financial organisations.
As the Head of Digital User Experience at TSB said, “It’s important to us that people can bank with TSB the way they want to, whether that’s in a branch, on the phone, via an app or online. Improving the customer experience on our website is therefore a key focus area, and working with Creative Virtual has helped us to do that.”
Our thanks to the event organisers for a great day and to all who stopped by the Creative Virtual stand to learn more. If you’d like to find out more about our innovative solutions, please get in touch.
Please also take a few minutes to participate in our 2015 Customer Support Outlook Survey for a chance to win some cool prizes – click here to get started!
