Rapid technological innovation presents a myriad of opportunities. But with opportunity comes a myriad of challenges. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the banking and finance sector.
Banking used to be a face-to-face industry, requiring you to physically visit a branch to have your identity verified before you could perform transactions. But those days are long gone. Now you can check your account balance, deposit, withdraw and transfer money, apply for a credit card or loan, request a new card, report fraud or suspicious activity, all without having to set foot in a branch. You can read our guide to Omnichannel Banking and its benefits and challenges.
Technological innovation has completely revolutionized the industry. This isn’t a bad thing; it can help organizations cut costs, streamline their operations and deliver a better service. But the absence of face-to-face interactions means that your digitized points of customer contact must be operating at 100% (or as close to that as possible), or you run the risk of losing customers to someone else who is.
Our customer is one of the largest banks in Europe, spreading across 22 countries, and servicing over 150 million clients. Its online banking is actively used by approximately 61 million people. 99.6% of their transactions are performed electronically.
The availability and flawless response of the 30 mission critical phone numbers in all customer interactions was key to achieving challenging business targets. Corporate and retail customers calling from different regions and time zones had to be served with the same high-quality standards. But they were facing challenges.
Changes in the infrastructure caused unexpected outages. The Avaya Contact Centre (CC) agents located in different regions were regularly disconnected from the centralized Avaya Aura CC for unknown reasons, making them unavailable for serving bank customers. The CC operations team were having trouble identifying the root cause of the issue and had limited means to troubleshoot efficiently.
Unsurprisingly, they received a lot of complaints, their customers were dissatisfied and some even reported changing their banking provider as a result of the poor quality of service.
The IT team were using more than 30 tools to monitor their environment, and they still lacked adequate visibility and troubleshooting capabilities to identify and resolve the problems. They approached us to see if we could help.
IR Prognosis for Contact Centre and Path Insight enabled a real-time view into their CC and network infrastructure environments. The customized Prognosis dashboards and integration into the centralized NOC gave their operation team a real-time view of the environment and enabled 24x7 alerting of on-duty engineers about issues before they happen. As their large infrastructure evolves dynamically with daily changes and reconfigurations, Prognosis assures high stability of the environment and allows immediate troubleshooting in the event of failures.
Management dashboards and reports provide the management team with critical information about call quality and agents availability.
Prognosis HeartBeat provides assurance about availability and call quality of the 30 critical phone numbers. Since implementing Heartbeat, on several cases the on-duty engineers were alerted about connectivity issues and were able to proactively take steps to restore the service with no or minimized losses.
After introduction of Prognosis the customer was able to reorganize its CC operations team, streamline IT operations and achieve higher efficiency with less resources. Meaning that time, money and energy could be spent on bigger initiatives.
Recently the bank adopted its 2020 strategy, which focuses on reaching the next level in terms of digitalisation, which will enable it to compete with global technology companies while remaining the best bank for retail customers and businesses. This strategy concentrates on three priorities:
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again; using performance management tools to monitor your communications environments means you can become more proactive and dedicate more resource to higher-value tasks. It also means you’re more likely to implement successful technology deployments, improve employee productivity, avoid downtime, reduce costs and, most importantly, improve the experience for your customers.