How Video Takes Customer Engagement to the Next Level in the Bank Contact Center (Part 3)

If you read the first installments of this blog series, you know that most banks are planning to leverage video to enhance customer engagement and that early adopters already enjoy very tangible benefits. In this installment, we’ll explore the key ways in which banks can integrate video in the contact center to increase customer satisfaction and lifetime value.

For banks, the contact center has always played a critical role in “moments of truth.” When a customer calls to report a stolen credit card or to complain about extra fees that they‘ve noticed on their bank account statement, their emotion is often running high and the quality of the interaction is key to ensure customer satisfaction and maintain loyalty. The role of the contact center has evolved in the recent years. As branch traffic declines and banks implement more effective self-service tools, the contact center has become the primary touch point for many new transactions, including more complex ones – like a mortgage application. For many customers, the contact center agent also represents the only human interaction point. As such, while contact center agents still handle typical interactions like changing an address or ordering a new check booklet, they are increasingly asked to identify customer needs as well as to help the customer navigate the portfolio of products and services.

The challenges with traditional contact center interaction channels such as telephony, text chat or email is that they do not allow the level of personal interaction that more complex or emotionally-ridden tasks require to be handled effectively. Over the phone and, even more so, over text chat, it’s not easy to deal with unhappy, or even angry, customers or to establish a trustful relationship that encourages them to talk about more of their needs than what they were initially enquiring for. Enter live, interactive video.

Use Case 1: Video Supports Complex or Highly Emotional Online Interactions in the Contact Center

You’ve probably had an experience where you got a bit testy at a call center agent who you felt wasn’t empathetic to your needs. We all have. With video collaboration, those days are over!

Video delivers the missing human element by enabling lifelike interactions between the customer and agent and facilitates a much higher quality relation and mutual understanding. The video collaboration experience can also be enhanced with additional features such as screen sharing and co-browsing.

Case in point: IndusInd Bank enjoys a 1.7x higher NPS with its video banking service compared to standard voice service.

The video channel can either be used as the primary inquiry mechanism – the customer typically selects a click-to-video-call button on the bank’s website or mobile application – or as an escalation path for a conversation that is initiated via phone or online chat but requires a higher level of engagement. The agents can simply offer to the customers to escalate to a video session when they feel that it will add value to the conversation.

Use Case 2: The Video Contact Center Rescues the Branch

How frustrating is it to wait for 30 minutes in a queue before being able to accomplish a very simple transaction in a minute! Or, even worse, wait for 30 minutes only to hear “Oh, you cannot do that here, you need to go to our larger branch on the other side of town!”

Some banks and credit unions are leveraging video to transform the in-branch experience, reducing wait times and offering access to expert resources that are not available in the branch. A visitor walks into a branch and meets a “greeter” who assesses their right at the branch entrance. If the transaction that the customer wants to accomplish requires a skill set not available in the branch – say a mortgage specialist – the customer is directed into a dedicated video-enabled room or kiosk where they remotely engage with the best available resource. Not only does this enhance the branch visitor experience, it also enables the bank to centralize its resources and use them in a much more efficient way.

An astonishing result: at Consumers Credit Union, the average wait for a new loan application went from up to 1.5 hours, depending on the branch, to under 2 minutes after in-branch video banking was introduced.

Use Case 3: Video Transforms the ATM Support Experience

Let’s say you are using an ATM and, for an unexpected reason, the transaction that you are trying to accomplish keeps failing. In an old-school way, you would have to call the bank contact center or enter a branch office, tell your story from the start and hope that someone understands the context of the ATM you are using and is either able to explain what you should do or help you complete the transaction in another way. Something that you expected to do in a couple of minutes ends up taking a very long time. How frustrating!

With a video-enabled ATM, customers can simply select a video call support option to get immediate ad-hoc assistance from a live video center agent who has the necessary ATM expertise and can guide them through the steps they need to take.

Lessons Learned From Video Banking Implementations

  • Video does not increase interaction costs. When considering video banking, many banks expect call duration and agent workload to increase along with the average cost of an interaction. However, our experience working with banks around the globe proves quite the opposite. Our customers report that first call resolution rates increase and average handling time actually decreases.
  • Video agents must be carefully selected and trained. To ensure video banking success, agents must be knowledgeable, confident, and comfortable on camera. Unlike traditional call center agents, they must maintain eye contact with the customers with whom they are communicating, which means that they cannot easily look for additional information during a call or put the conversation on hold to be able to talk to their supervisors.
  • Video makes the agent’s role more rewarding. Some of our customers report a lower agent churn rate and have been able to create a career path for their top performing phone/chat agents to become video advisors.
  • A video-friendly environment must be staged. Attention must be paid to things such as appropriate lighting, the color of the background in front of which the agents are sitting during the video calls, background noise, etc. In many cases, banks that have created dedicated video banking booths for their agents in order to achieve these optimal conditions.

Stay tuned for more on this series.  To learn more about the features and benefits of Vidyo, visit the application listing on the Genesys 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 technology 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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