Member Service Experience for Mobile Banking Apps
The Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) from 2017 revealed that about half of U.S. adults with bank accounts had used a smartphone to access those accounts during the previous year. In 2019, eMarketer predicts that nearly 120 million smartphone users in the U.S. will use their bank’s mobile app at least once per month for transactions. And Citi’s 2018 Mobile Banking Study found that mobile banking apps ranked third in most-used (at 31 percent measured by top two ranked responses), behind only social media apps (at 55 percent) and weather apps (at 33 percent).
These findings leave no doubt: Even traditional industries or sectors like banking are heavily digitizing and people are accessing these services through mobile or web.And this preference for mobile apps applies to all age groups, from Baby Boomers to Millennials, two-thirds of whom identified mobile apps as their preferred channel for communicating with companies, according to a study by Salesforce.Most banks already know this. What many don’t know is that integrating customer service into the app provides an opportunity to increase customer satisfaction, build brand loyalty, and create a competitive advantage. Just as the smartphone has changed banking, it has also changed customer service.
Customer Service in the Era of the Smartphone
Customer service has always been important. Gartner estimates that poor customer service is costing businesses over $75 billion in lost revenue every year in the U.S. alone. According to GrooveHQ, an angry customer will, on average, tell 16 people about a bad experience, and research shows it can take 10 or more positive experiences to make up for just a single negative one. By contrast, GrooveHQ found that happy customers will tell, on average, nine others about a positive experience, and that 86 percent of consumers are willing to pay more for products when knowing they will receive better service.
Enter the smartphone, which is fundamentally and forever changing the way people communicate. These devices are as powerful as they are commonplace, and being constantly connected makes it easy to learn about or experience new and better ways of doing things. With rapid improvements in convenience, productivity and knowledge, customer expectations are higher than ever before. Microsoft’s 2017 State of Global Customer Service report, for example, revealed that more than half (52 percent) of respondents in the U.S. already had a more favorable view of brands that offer a mobile-responsive customer service experience.
Separate research by The Digital Disconnect found that 75 percent of consumers would prefer to use mobile customer care inside an app because it reduces handle time and hassle. Unfortunately, the same study found that a full 95 percent of mobile apps force users to exit the app to get customer service via the smartphone’s separate voice, chat, texting or email features.
Making customer service a more seamless experience requires making enhancements at both ends of the engagement. Before understanding the role of the mobile banking app, it is necessary to understand how contact centers are being digitally transformed.
The Digital Contact Center
At the core of today’s digital transformations is data-driven decision-making, and the businesses achieving the best results are those transforming every aspect of their operations. The potential for improvement for brands using customer service is unprecedented. Forrester’s Digital Rewrites the Rules of Business Vision Report states, “Digital innovation is the untapped hero of customer service. A service call is an indicator of an unmet expectation. So why does it get so little airplay?”
Whether your bank uses the term “contact center” or “call center” the need is the same: to transform the service experience into one that dramatically improves both customer satisfaction and agent effectiveness. And just as the smartphone has changed the way people communicate, the cloud has changed how organizations implement transformational technologies.
Cloud-based Contact Center as-a-Service (CCaaS) offerings provide the context and the intelligent automation needed to both enhance and streamline the customer service experience. Context for each call comes from securely accessing the wealth of data currently available about customers, products, common issues, agent expertise, contact center activity, and more. This data-driven approach is what makes it possible to route each call more intelligently to the agent who is best able to resolve the customer’s issue on the first call.
Lack of meaningful context is the root cause of one of the most common complaints customers have about....-->
The Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) from 2017 revealed that about half of U.S. adults with bank accounts had used a smartphone to access those accounts during the previous year. In 2019, eMarketer predicts that nearly 120 million smartphone users in the U.S. will use their bank’s mobile app at least once per month for transactions. And Citi’s 2018 Mobile Banking Study found that mobile banking apps ranked third in most-used (at 31 percent measured by top two ranked responses), behind only social media apps (at 55 percent) and weather apps (at 33 percent).
These findings leave no doubt: Even traditional industries or sectors like banking are heavily digitizi...