In this ever-evolving world of credit unions, delivering exceptional customer service to members is not just a goal for these institutions; beyond that it is their competitive necessity. An industry study reveals that almost 89% of consumers say that quality of customer service is the key that compels them to stick to a particular financial institution.
Credit union services are mainly used by its members. These are not-for-profit organizations that work to provide the best services to their members. Many consumers look to credit unions for better rates on deposit accounts and lower interest rates on credit cards and loans. So, delivering the best customer service is the key goal for credit unions. These financial institutions always strive to provide efficient customer service.
A credit union always strives to deliver exceptional member service. However, when it comes to managing call centers, efficiency holds the utmost importance. Efficient call centers are crucial for providing outstanding customer service and enhancing operational performance. They ensure member concerns are resolved with care and accuracy.
What is Call Center Efficiency, Exactly?
Call center efficiency refers to the ability of agents to promptly and effectively resolve members’ problems while using minimal resources. It plays a crucial role in reducing average handling time, enhancing customer satisfaction, and controlling costs. Let’s understand the entire scenario with an example. Suppose a call center invests in its agents’ training and upgraded technology; this step helps reduce agents’ average handling time from 8 to 5 minutes.
Ultimately, this reduction helps call center owners optimize resource utilization, boost efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction. An efficient call center equips its agents with the latest tools and technologies to ensure quick response times. Also, they implement specific key performance indicators used to measure efficiency.
- First-call resolution is the percentage of problems resolved in the first call or interaction.
- Agent utilization rates show the time agents spend in productive activities such as performing call-related work or handling calls.
- Average handling time shows an agent’s total time to complete an interaction or call, including hold, wrap, and talk times.
- Member satisfaction score, or CSAT, indicates customer loyalty and how happy they are with the services provided to them.
How is Call Center Efficiency Measured?
When it comes to measuring call center efficiency, it starts with tracking metrics. For example, if the average handling time for credit unions is more than the set industry standard of 4 to 6 minutes, then this is the time to invest more in agent training. Likewise, if there is a low FCR, contact centers must channel their resources toward introducing more knowledge bases and improving agent workflows.
Strategies to Improve Call Center Efficiency for Credit Unions
When credit unions leverage efficient call center tools and develop strategies around them, they can better manage customer inquiries and resolve issues effectively. This approach enables them to maximize resource utilization while providing robust support.
Let’s explore the strategies that credit unions can adopt to achieve faster response times and deliver efficient customer service.
AI Automation for Customer Self Service
The Gartner report shows that over 80% of enterprises will have deployed or used Generative AI-enabled applications or APIs by 2026. This means that the banking sector or credit unions must invest in providing comprehensive digital self-service platforms for customers to keep pace.
Customers often contact credit unions to resolve issues such as account opening, loan processing, payment services, or other transactions. Each time a customer interacts with a support representative, the agent must repeatedly verify the customer’s documents or relevant information. In some cases, agents also need to create documents to assist customers.
However, creating the documents or performing the required steps to seek relevant information requires much manual effort and time. It often frustrates agents and impacts their performance. This is where automation comes into play. Automating such processes plays a vital role in improving the outcome.
For example, virtual assistants and AI-powered tools like InfiBot can help customers resolve their problems. It provides agents with real-time language translations. AI chatbots are trained to automate responses for various issues, generate sales, and promote financial products such as discounts or new offers. InfiBot helps agents verify the caller’s identity, generate accurate responses, and automatically route the conversation to relevant agents.
With InfiBot, agents can understand the customer’s sentiments based on text or spoken responses. It helps them to choose empathetic answers that can improve customer experience. Not only this, InfiBot can provide relevant answers after analyzing the data.
Apart from this, conversational AI chatbots like InfiBot can be deployed on any platform, whether websites, social media pages, or mobile applications. These AI-powered tools resolve customers’ requests quickly and handle a large volume of customer requests, both complex and straightforward. As a result, your agents get time to focus on resolving more complex customer problems.
Unify the Omnichannel Experiences
These days, customers have several options for connecting financial institutions or credit unions. They can reach out for their problems through social media platforms, SMS, emails, calls, etc. Addressing every customer’s problem coming from any interaction channel is crucial. It is only possible when the credit union customer support team focuses on unifying omnichannel experiences.
This can be done by using advanced contact center support tools. For example, CXInfinity allows agents to access customer information from multiple channels on a single screen. In this case, when a customer initiates interacting through email and later moves to live chat, the credit union agent handling the conversation can access all previous interaction history.
Customers don’t need to repeat their problems or questions, even when transferred between multiple agents or channels. Credit union agents can also access key customer data, such as previous purchases, transactions, loan-related communications, geographical location, and more.
With this information, agents can deliver accurate and personalized responses, enhancing the customer experience. By offering unified omnichannel experiences, credit unions can retain more customers by allowing them to choose their preferred communication channel, thereby reducing communication barriers.
Use of Real-Time Analytics
With real-time analytics, credit unions and banks can help their agents improve performance by analyzing interactions. These institutions can implement real-time monitoring tools, such as the Supervisor and Unified Agent Desktop, to evaluate agents’ performance in real-time.
The Supervisor Desktop lets managers view agent performance and queue summaries without switching between devices or applications. This enables managers to intervene, if necessary, to improve call resolution. They can also track agent productivity and assess customer sentiment during interactions.
By leveraging the sentiment analysis feature, supervisors can monitor customers’ emotional states throughout the interaction. This helps identify potential escalations, allowing supervisors to address them proactively.
Optimize Call Routing
With Smart call routing, credit unions and financial institutions can ensure their customers are connected to the most skilled agents, who can answer their questions accurately. It reduces transfer rates and enables faster call resolutions.
Credit unions can depend on CTI integrations. They can connect CTI with their telephony system for efficient call management. Managers can use this CTI Integration to align call routing with ticketing and help agents provide more targeted and personalized support. This results in quicker resolutions.
The integrations display the caller’s information, including past tickets, voice logs, and the respective interactions of each customer. With this, agents can help customers experience a more personalized conversation. The call logging system automates the logging of tickets within the ticketing system.
CTI integrations help agents take notes in real-time during the call. They can capture details and record any commitments or actions made during the call. When integrated with tickets, these call notes allow agents to refer for future interactions.
Wrap Up
The world is becoming fast-paced due to technological advancements, and customers can access several digital channels to contact their contact center. Credit unions and financial institutions must equip themselves with the right tools and strategies to deliver excellent customer service and experience.
With the right strategies, such as enabling AI automation for customer self-service, intelligent call routing, and unifying omnichannel support, you can provide a seamless and personalized customer experience to keep your customers happy. Think about technologies like sentiment analysis and AI-powered tools like Infibot that are vital in shaping the future of customer service.
By tapping into these technologies, you streamline your processes, improve customer satisfaction, and provide your agents with the necessary tools to perform to their fullest.
The best time to embrace these innovations is now. If you are ready to take solid steps to make your credit union more efficient, partner with Novelvox and allow its team to empower your team with the tools and strategies they need to excel.
