In today’s post-crisis banking environment, it is more critical than ever for banks to maintain strong relationships with their customers. Improving customer engagement and loyalty through personalized customer service, convenience and proactive outreach is proving to be a measurable competitive advantage.

At the same time, there is increasing pressure to cut costs throughout all financial service organizations. The two goals seem opposing on the surface, but are they?

In our sophisticated communication environment, the ability to balance great service with the need to contain costs may seem further than ever from reach. But is it?

We’ll discuss the advantages of modern contact center systems, including ways to:

Use business intelligence, personalization and analytics to streamline and enhance self-service interactions
Segment the customer base to drive revenue through tailored product offerings, up-sell and cross-sell offers
Deepen customer relationships with proactive outbound customer engagement and notifications
Address changing customer communication preferences including mobile and social channels
Simplify compliance with evolving industry regulatory requirements
Understand how personalized self-service can be used to cost-effectively strengthen your brand, increase loyalty and obtain new customers.

A key point in the study is that Social CRM is still very new ground. Making an investment now allows organizations to “get in on the ground floor” and lay the framework to support additional channels as they evolve, and to be part of the creation of the best practices for what works in the social sphere. As the technology evolves, it’s likely that social will cease to be an “add-on” or optional support channel and much more likely that it will become standard to CRM implementations due to customer expectations. (This evolution may happen faster than you think: per a recent story on MediaBistro, 71% of 16-24 year olds indicate the first thing they do when they have a problem with a product is go online, and the shift to social channels is not exclusive to that demographic. ) The overarching goal is to create a single, unified view of the customer. This way, appropriate social media interaction with the customer can be conducted with the appropriate history and context.

Some of the key differentiators of social CRM that will require your business to put new best practices into place are:

• Channels are now customer-dictated. While voice-based call centers offer only inbound and/or outbound IVR customer service, consumers will chatter on social networks of their choice, at whatever time they see fit. Your strategy and technology for monitoring and responding via these channels will necessarily evolve. Technologically, the biggest challenge will be combining all of these communication channels to maintain a single view of the customer, so that social interactions can be tailored to the individual with the same history and context as a voice interaction where an agent has the benefit of a screenpop with all the relevant information.
• Conversations are continuously adapting, and non-scripted. When issues are escalated from automated systems, call center agents still can often work off of a script while social conversations are more likely to go into tangents and often have a different set of rules of (n)etiquette. Agents may need special training, particularly if they are not digital natives.
• New metrics are important. Because of the visibility of social channels, there is now significant transparency into the sentiment about your brand. Appropriate analytics will need to be implemented to separate the signal from the noise and evaluate not just sentiment, but also efficiency, effectiveness and return on investment for your efforts. Reporting tools and dashboards can assist subject matter experts and other stakeholders in assessing this data.
• Timeliness is critical. Much like how channels are customer-dictated, many businesses – particularly large ones – will find there is a 24/7 expectation of rapid responses via the social channel.

Once these core competencies are understood, they are used to enable the three critical activities in the social space: listening, understanding and responding. Each phase incorporates different elements of the aforementioned core competencies. Listening requires appropriate tools and analytics; understanding requires sentiment analysis and the ability to put feedback into context; responding requires accuracy and timeliness.

At Voxeo, our Prophecy and VoiceObjects platforms let you create a social CRM tailored specifically to your business, and provide unified self-service across channels so that you can reach customers in the way they want to be reached, whether it’s via SMS, social media, mobile apps or voice. To learn more about the ways in which consumer expectations are evolving in the social and mobile space and how your business should be responding, check out our whitepaper, “Unified Self-Service: Delivering On the Value Of Multi-Channel Customer Interactions.”

Want to learn how Voxeo can help unlock your communications and deliver a better customer experience? Please contact us!

Orlando, FL – Waterfield Technologies, a leading provider of customer service solutions, and Voxeo, the Unlocked Communications™ market leader, have partnered to address the unique customer care and communication challenges facing today’s financial institutions (FIs). This partnership will revolutionize the way banks and credit unions interact with their customers in five major areas to improve customer retention, competitive positioning and profitability.

“Focusing on customer loyalty and engagement has always been key to successful revenue growth for companies; however, the current economic pressures facing banks and credit unions across the country has amplified the importance of these initiatives,” said Anne Bowman, chief customer officer at Voxeo. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans’ loyalty to their primary banks fell to 23 percent in November 2011 from 32 percent in September 2010. “Banking customers are more likely than ever to switch their primary bank, creating a huge need for the industry to hone communications efforts that lead to increased loyalty,” she said.

Voxeo optimizes the way companies communicate with their customers using Interactive Voice Response (IVR), text, mobile web and social media. Waterfield has joined the Voxeo Connect partner program as a Certified Partner to offer deep expertise building and deploying solutions for financial institutions.
Together, the companies will deliver advantages in the following key areas:

1. Customer Experience Improvements. By leveraging the latest technologies and best practices, financial institutions can better balance the conflicting goals of improving customer loyalty while lowering costs. Many financial institutions haven’t updated their voice customer service channels in years. Waterfield and Voxeo enable personalized self-service capabilities that dynamically adapt to individual customer preferences, streamlining common requests for a better user experience and resulting in fewer overall transfers to a representative. The solution is also “multi-channel ready,” for a unified customer experience across voice, text, chat, mobile web, and native mobile platforms such as iOS and Android.

2. Proactive Customer Care. The most progressive financial institutions are using outbound IVR and SMS to offer customers the information they need, when they need it–and even before they know they need it. For example, outbound efforts can provide payment reminders, notifications and low-balance alerts to improve customer loyalty while reducing overall support costs. The solution easily integrates with common core banking platforms and utilizes existing business intelligence systems to enable personalized up-sell and cross-sell offers that drive revenue and increase Customer Lifetime Value.

3. Integrated Business Intelligence. IVR systems are a frequent source of customer as well as organizational frustration. When self-service is done properly, it’s a win for the customer and the business. The Voxeo and Waterfield solution offers built-in, actionable analytics and reports to eliminate the “black box” aspect of legacy voice platforms thus enabling customer-focused teams to easily pinpoint issues in real-time, better understand customer behaviors, and identify opportunities to enhance the overall service experience. This baseline understanding will empower organizations of all sizes to adapt and evolve their customer strategies to compete in today emerging financial marketplace.

4. Self-Service Administration. Unlike legacy IVR systems, Voxeo and Waterfield offer a solution built on known web standards for flexibility, control and ease of management. This standards-based platform enables FIs to utilize their existing IT staff to make routine changes and update self-service menus as dictated by the business. This capability represents a fundamental shift for FIs who have historically been captive to black box legacy IVR vendors for maintenance and upkeep of critical customer-facing voice channels.

5. Simplified Security and Regulatory Compliance. Banks are facing increased regulatory pressure to protect the privacy of customer data. With a 100 percent standards-based, certified-compliant solution and capabilities such as two-factor authentication and in-queue PIN validation, Voxeo and Waterfield ease the complexities of ensuring automated customer interactions are secure.

John Marino, president at Waterfield Technologies, said, “Industry analysts acknowledge Voxeo as a leading provider of IVR and multi-channel self-service. To that, Waterfield adds many years of financial services experience and pre-built interfaces to most of the common core platforms utilized throughout the industry. The combined solution positions our customers to take advantage of the latest technologies to build stronger, more profitable relationships with their customers and better compete for new customers.”

“Institutions that view their contact centers and services as a cost of doing business will struggle in a market where the source of differentiation has shifted to the customer experience,” said Denny Adams, director of channel sales at Voxeo. “We’re partnering with Waterfield to help financial institutions uncover opportunities to improve customer loyalty, drive more revenue and achieve bottom-line costs savings.”

Learn more and read our whitepaper, “Slashing Costs and Improving Customer Care in Financial Institutions” at www.waterfieldtechnologies.com/solutions/financial-services/

About Waterfield Technologies
Waterfield Technologies is a leading provider of multi-channel customer service solutions for financial services and enterprise organizations worldwide. The company’s suite of solutions provides our customers the opportunity to improve the speed, quality and efficiency of customer, business partner and stakeholder interactions while reducing their overall assisted-service operating costs. Learn more at www.waterfieldtechnologies.com

About Voxeo
Voxeo unlocks communications. We loathe the locks that make voice, SMS, instant messaging, Twitter, web chat, and mobile web, unified communication and self-service applications difficult to create, manage, analyze, optimize and afford. Every day we work to unlock the neglected value of these communications solutions with open standards, disruptive innovation and a passion for problem solving–fueled by a company-wide obsession with customer success. We do so for more than 250,000 developers, 45,000 companies and half of the Fortune 100 from our headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne, and London. Visit us or join our conversations on the web at www.voxeo.com, blogs.voxeo.com or twitter.com/voxeo

ECCU, a full-service financial institution and banking resource for churches, Christian schools, missionaries, and other evangelical ministries, selected WT to both streamline their new account opening process and improve their existing IVR.

Online Enrollment & Account Opening

Waterfield’s Online Enrollment & Account Opening solution allows ECCU customers to open and fund new accounts in a simple online process, turning the online environment into a highly profitable sales channel. Built upon Outsystems .NET Agile Development Platform, WT’s solution includes industry-leading risk management, reporting, compliance, and configurability, as well as initial funding via transfers over the ACH network. The new solution provides ECCU with a secure, convenient method to serve their growing membership base within the US as well as missionaries serving throughout the world.

WT’s solution features real-time integration with FIS/eFunds ID Verification to protect against identity fraud and comply with the PATRIOT Act Section 326, 314 (a) and OFAC regulations. In addition to verification, the solution also validates, verifies and authenticates an applicant’s identity at new account opening with ID Authentication. Incorporating all aspects of the membership enrollment and account opening process into one solution, will allow ECCU and members to instantly open and fund new accounts.

IVR

WT was also selected to upgrade, service, and make modifications to ECCU’s existing IVR. WT upgraded ECCU to the most current Convergys/Edify Voice Interaction Platform (EVIP). The new solution provides customers with anytime, anywhere access to account information. WT also built a development environment for ECCU to ensure all changes and modifications are throughly approved and tested prior to deploying in a production environment.

About ECCU

ECCU is the banking resource for churches, Christian schools, and other evangelical ministries nationwide. They also serve missionaries in more than 100 countries around the world. While its business focus is providing financial services to evangelical organizations, the credit union does provide personal banking services such as savings and checking accounts to individual members and their families. For more than 45 years ECCU’s members and employees have shared a commitment to the mission of making evangelical Christian ministries more effective.

In collaboration with Consent Media, Waterfield Technologies designed and developed a mobile campground/RV application for Woodall’s, a leading provider of information about RVing and family camping for over 70 years.

Woodall’s RV & Camping Copilot

The Woodall’s RV & Camping Copilot iPhone app provides complete campground information that details the amenities, services, types of campsites for over 12,000 campgrounds and RV parks across North America. It also details many camping discounts offered at parks. Private campgrounds also include Woodall’s 5W/5W Rating System, which is the most trusted consumer campground rating.

Click here to learn more about the iPhone app and Woodall’s.

About ConsentMedia

Consent Media has been delivering results-driven digital media and marketing solutions long before it was consensual or defined as “digital”. Since 2001, the Consent Media executive and account management team has strategically lived, used and leveraged the digital media technologies of wireless, mobile, voice marketing, interactive voice response (IVR), e-mail marketing, broadcast, video, and social media to cost-effectively acquire new customers and enhance loyalty by extending the lifecycle value profitability chain of existing customers.

By delivering innovative lead generation, new customer acquisition and ongoing retention and loyalty marketing programs, the Consent Media team has assisted many of the world’s leading retailers, healthcare, financial services and insurance companies measurably drive down costs while growing incremental revenue.

With an emphasis on optimizing efficiency, quality and performance across all communications channels, Waterfield’s offerings address the growing need for enterprises to automate, integrate, personalize and mobilize customer, supplier and employee interactions.

Leveraging standards-based technology from world class hardware, software and services partners, WT provides a blended delivery model for the full range of multi-channel integration – from leading-edge self-service web, voice, email, speech, mobile and contact center automation solutions to high performance desktop and back-office integration suites that enable a synchronized end-to-end customer experience. By optimizing interaction channels, your organization can enhance analysis and planning, improve the development and deployment of multi-channel cross-sell and retention programs and measure the effectiveness of marketing, sales and service strategies.

Kiboo™ isn’t an online bank; it’s a place where you learn about your money and your money learns about you. We’re here to help young people and their parents learn the right way to become financially responsible by offering the best, safest, and most secure tools to help you manage your money and reach your goals.

Kiboo™ helps you budget, spend, save, and give in ways that are all customized around you, and what makes you happy.

Getting the things you want, making sure you have the things you need, helping your community, and a more fulfilled financial life are all part of the Kiboo package.

Learn more about Kiboo™ at kiboo.com

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