Enhancing the Customer-Advisor Relation with Video Banking (Part 4)

In the last blog post, we discussed the benefits of adding video capabilities to a bank contact center. Today, we would to touch on some aspects of how video can also play a critical role in transforming the customer experience outside of the contact center.

The most common use case here is the management of the relationship with mass affluent customers or high net worth individuals, i.e. clients who have the highest buying power for a variety of financial products and therefore need the most advanced advice.

When such individuals are identified by a financial institution, a dedicated advisor is usually assigned and tasked to hold regular reviews to understand their needs and investment priorities in order to build a collaborative plan and offer the most relevant products and services. It sounds simple but it’s actually a difficult task. Why? Most of the time, the advisor’s schedule is irreconcilable with the way the customer would like to interact. Typically the advisor sits in a branch and works 9am-5am Monday to Friday while the customer also has a job and does not want to waste any time visiting a branch during business hours.

So very few physical meetings are actually held. Most of the discussions are conducted over email or phone calls, which is good enough for quick interactions but does not do the job when a more in-depth conversation is needed. It does not enable the advisors to establish the level of trust and intimacy that would help them do up-selling and cross-selling. The customers are also frustrated because they value customized in-person advice and are in demand of quality interactions to understand the complexity of some of the financial services products they are offered and make informed decisions.

Video banking is the perfect means to overcome these challenges. By allowing its staff to schedule video meetings with customers, a bank can dramatically enhance its ability to maintain a personal and meaningful relationship with customers, which ultimately drives more sales and contributes to increasing satisfaction and building loyalty.

The customers can attend the video meetings wherever they happen to – at home, at their office, on-the-go, etc. – and with the device of their choice – computer, smartphone, tablet. So a 30-minute meeting just consumes 30 minutes of their time, they don’t have to allocate time for the commute to and from the branch. With a high-quality solution like Vidyo, they can enjoy a lifelike meeting experience very close to what they would get if they were in the advisor’s office. It also enables to share content such as mortgage simulation charts to make the meeting much more effective than a phone call for instance. It’s a huge step forward in convenience. Barclays report that the Net Promoter Score of their video banking service is 44% higher than telephony.

I have to admit that, when only used by in-branch staff, it does not fully solve the issue of serving customers outside of traditional working hours but actually we see many banks offering such services later at night or on weekends. That’s easier to manage because they can do it from a central location rather than opening all their branches. It, of course, requires staffing the advisory team slightly differently but the additional positive impact on customer convenience and satisfaction is dramatic.

The ability to host multiparty video calls is also a very valuable feature that can even make an online meeting more effective than a branch visit. If a discussion is needed on a very complex financial product, the advisor can invite a subject matter expert to join the meeting from the bank’s headquarters or from another branch. Similarly, if the customer’s significant other needs to be involved to discuss a mortgage that they are jointly applying for, he/she can also join the meeting from a different location.

Last but not least, integrating a digital signature capability with the video solution ensures that transactions can be conducted remotely from end to end.

So, with such advanced features, a video customer engagement service could potentially be fully self-sufficient but of course most of the time it actually does not aim at fully replacing any of the existing forms of interaction. There will still be occasions when an in-branch visit will add value or when a phone call will be good enough. Using the most effective and preferred channel for the customer at each step of the buying journey is key to offering a best-in-class customer experience.

This was initially described as an outside-of-the-contact-center use case, but for the sake of comprehensiveness, we would also like to add that we are increasingly witnessing an appetite of the banks to integrate the workflows and outcomes of the video meetings inside the CRM and contact center applications. Their goal is to keep track records of all customer interactions in a single place to contribute to delivering a true omnichannel experience.

The good news is that the partnership between Genesys and Vidyo allows them doing exactly that easily and seamlessly. Learn more about Vidyo’s integration by visiting their app listing available on the AppFoundry marketplace.

This blog was co-authored by the Vidyo team. Vidyo is the leader in video customer engagement. Vidyo offers a solution that meets the technical requirements to deliver a superior experience in a consumer environment and provides all the advanced features that banks require: high security, video call recording and archiving, high audio and video quality, scalability, branding and customization, and more. Through its partnership with Genesys, Vidyo integrates this best-of-breed video component into the best omnichannel customer experience platform to ensure a frictionless experience for the bank’s customer.

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