Optimizing the Call Center Experience

In a highly competitive market, the pressure is on for every credit union to deliver information fast. New and existing members are less loyal, more mobile and increasingly technology savvy. This means credit unions must ensure that every touchpoint a member has with the organization is a positive experience.

Your credit union’s call center is most likely the hub of all the action, where members expect representatives to be knowledgeable and get their issues, problems and questions resolved. Additionally, with customer service often the main differentiator when it comes to whether a member chooses to stay or leave, your customer service staff plays a major role in maintaining member loyalty. To deliver a positive experience with the agility required to respond appropriately, credit unions need innovative, new ways to meet the challenge.

Ensuring your credit union has an up-to-date and informed call center requires having the right customer communication management tools in place that make it possible to communicate with members quickly and accurately, reducing the time and cost to serve each member while improving the member’s experience. In today’s world, that takes choosing a user-friendly infrastructure that allows the call center staff to have the right information at hand and empowers them to effectively manage individual customer cases as they arise.

Empowering the front-line staff

Providing your call center staff with the ability to deliver personal, prompt service while ensuring business rules and corporate standards are followed and risks are minimized is no doubt a challenge. However, today there are solutions on the market that can make this seemingly complex process simple as well as rewarding. Specifically designed for customer service centers, there are interactive customer communications solutions offering easy-to-follow features that allow individual representatives to personalize communications on the fly and deliver them through the members’ preferred channel. Call center representatives are able to set up follow-up letters and emails on their own and have access to easy-to-use online formatting and editing with drop-down texts, all with centralized predefined text blocks, charts and images. Having the ability to maintain templates, logic and contact reduces reliance on IT staff. More importantly, representatives can solve issues quickly while at the same time provide excellent customer service.

Automating the process steps makes it possible for the representative handling a case to fully concentrate on the right message to each member. Having the authority, power and ability to solve issues as they come in will significantly increase efficiency. With speed to market for changes greatly improved, this shortened response time can only increase the member experience—and their loyalty.

What to look for in an interactive solution

Sourcing the right solution to implement these interactive capabilities requires a few basics. First, the platform you choose should be able to support batch and ad-hoc, real-time document processing (both printed and electronic) in the volumes needed. Then, ensure the solution has full multichannel output capabilities for all common output formats, as well as the ability to integrate within existing infrastructure and architecture in place. Of course, it is important to ensure that the solution you deploy has the appropriate controls and access rights applied to content, data and logic so unauthorized users cannot change corporate-approved content.

Benefits of an interactive world

Having a fully integrated interactive correspondence solution with multichannel backend not only addresses customer preferences in real-time, it also saves costs in a number of ways by eliminating many internal steps and improving agility. Additionally, credit unions will profit from less paper usage and postage. Ultimately, however, the main benefit is improved customer retention with the opportunity to engage in a two-way communication with your members, keeping them loyal and happy for the long haul.

Steve Francis

Steve Francis

Steve Francis is president and general manager of North America for GMC Software Technology, the leader in Customer Communications Management (CCM) solutions. A former executive at IBM and Ricoh, Mr. ... Web: www.gmc.net/en/home Details