Outsourcing your banking or financial call center services is a great way to give your customers more while spending less. You can benefit from the call center vendor’s vast experience and expertise and devote more time to growing other aspects of your business. It also saves companies an average of 40% on their labor costs.
In the financial industry, call center services are essential for helping customers resolve queries with minimum stress and uncertainty. OutPLEX can provide your financial institution with the capability to do this.
Why Consider Outsourcing Your Call Center?
You’ve built your business to provide customers with quality banking and financial services. Call center services are an important part of that. However, as Forbes reports, trying to build a call center yourself is not always the best use of your time and resources. Outsourcing your call center to another vendor comes with benefits such as:
- An established center: You do not have to worry about buying equipment, renting space, or hiring and training employees. We already have all of these assets ready for your use.
- Tech support: If something is not working as it should, our 24/7 helpdesk is on call to help.
- Years of experience: OutPLEX has been in the call center industry for over 20 years, so we know how to provide the greatest value to you and your customers.
- Lower costs: Outsourcing to an established vendor requires a smaller investment from you than building a call center from scratch. Many of our clients have cut their operational expenses in half.
We are able to save our clients money by nearshoring or basing our call centers in countries that are close to the United States but have lower operating costs. In addition to minimizing expenses, our facilities in Colombia and the Dominican Republic increase the value of our services by:
- Giving you access to trained live agents: Our agents already know how to interact with customers. This includes showing empathy to frustrated callers and repeating instructions as necessary.
- Being close to the U.S.: This means our agents share time zones, languages, and cultural elements with your customers, making communication easier and more efficient.
- Including retraining: Your business goals may require live agents to behave in a particular way. We can help identify what approaches work best and train our agents accordingly.
Getting the Most Out of Outsourcing
As Boston Consulting Group found, a company’s outsourcing experience tends to improve when they play an active role in designing the client/vendor agreement and determining the goals of outsourcing (e.g., increasing customer satisfaction rates by a certain percentage by a certain date).
At OutPLEX, we make it easier for our clients to stay involved by:
- Using your goals to design a plan of action: If you already know what goals you hope to achieve through outsourcing your call center, that gives us a head start. If not, we are more than happy to help you define your goals and figure out how to meet them.
- Responding to questions promptly: Any time you have a problem or a concern, let us know. We will do our best to resolve it as quickly as possible.
- Staying in contact: We check in regularly with updates about progress towards reaching your goals. If ever those goals are not being met, we work closely with our clients to identify why and implement solutions.
By outsourcing your call center to us, you get the best of both worlds: you do not have to deal with day-to-day call center operations, but you remain in charge of the messaging that the call center uses.
Using Technology to Improve Call Center Services
Interactive voice response (IVR) deflection is a helpful tool for streamlining customers’ call center experience. Here is how it works:
- When a customer calls, an automated message responds.
- The automated message provides clear, simple instructions to enable the customer to explain why they are calling (e.g., allowing them to speak their concerns or press a button on their phone that corresponds with their issue).
- Based on the customer’s response, the system may be able to answer directly (e.g., if the customer asks about business hours, a prerecorded message can supply that information).
- If the system is unable to provide a direct answer, it can connect the customer to a live agent or deflect them to a messaging channel to resolve their concern.
In this way, IVR deflection can:
- Streamline the call center experience: Customers are quickly directed to the agent or the message that can be of most help to them.
- Reduce wait times: The deflection system kicks in right away and takes care of customers with simple requests. This allows customers with more complex queries to reach a live agent faster.
- Reduce expenses: Solving a customer’s problem on the first try costs less time and money—and saves the customer much frustration—than forcing them to call in repeatedly.
- Be customized to your business: If a customer does have to hold for a short time, we can use your business goals and values to help you decide what types of messages to play during the wait (e.g., promotions for a particular service).
Maximize Your Call Center’s Potential with Digital Channels
A call center offers tremendous value to customers and clients. However, it should not be the only way for customers to contact you.
Digital channels are an increasingly common way for customers to interact with financial institutions. The Conversocial State of CX Trends Report 2021 notes that, in the financial sector, online customer interactions increased 120% in 2020 over the previous year. Customers are living more of their lives online, and businesses must follow suit.
To help your customers get the most out of your call center, allow them to get in touch with you through digital channels as well. These channels include:
- Online messaging services: These include services linked to a social media site (e.g., Facebook Messenger) and apps (e.g., WhatsApp).
- SMS texting: For many, interacting via text message is simpler and less stressful than navigating a call center menu.
- Chatbots: Place a simple, intuitive chatbot in an obvious place on your website. Customers can use it to ask questions, such as where they can find a specific piece of information.
Digital channels are beneficial both in their own right and in relation to your financial business’s call center services. For instance, they can:
- Answer basic questions fast: Digital channels easily handle topics like account status or available balance, business hours, and business locations. The less time a customer has to spend getting an answer, the happier they will be.
- Lessen the burden on live agents: With digital channels handling so many simple queries, live agents have more time to spend with customers who truly need their assistance.
- Increase efficiency: It costs less to let a bot or a text message respond to a basic request than it does for a customer to call in, wait for a live agent, and explain what they need.
- Increase customer satisfaction: It goes without saying that customers like having their problems solved on the first try. Digital channels are proven to increase metrics like FCR and CSAT ratings.
- Empower customers: With a call center, the customer must give up a certain amount of control to the live agent. With digital channels, they remain in complete control of their own experience.
The right combination of digital and voice communication channels can create a customer service experience that your customers appreciate and that your business can be proud of.
See What OutPLEX Can Do for You
We want to help you improve your banking or financial business’s call center services and save money while doing it. We can tell you more about how call center outsourcing can improve your operations and the additional benefits provided by digital messaging channels. Call us today for a free quote.
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Learn more about our Banking & Financial Services CX Solutions.