New report: How to drive exceptional customer experience and value in financial services | #customersupport #supporticket

Heightened customer expectations for anytime, anywhere services, growing competition, and shifting workplace trends are putting new pressures on the financial services industry. RingCentral’s second annual Customer Success Metrics Survey in Financial Services shows that deploying a cloud-enabled communications and collaboration platform can be a powerful tool for meeting customer expectations and driving value across the organization.

Delivering significant benefits for employees and customers

According to the results of our recent survey, which included the opinions of executives and decision makers at financial services organizations in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, RingCentral delivers significant internal and customer-facing benefits that position their organizations for success in this rapidly changing climate.

In recent years, as new online products and services have emerged from financial services organizations, a growing number of customers have come to expect flexible, personalized mobile offerings. The global pandemic only exacerbated these growing pressures and increased the need for digital transformation. For example, banks saw an all-time high for mobile logins and check deposits along with spikes in call center interactions; insurance companies saw increased use of digital tools for claims processing and call center inquiries; and mortgage lenders saw record numbers of online applications and loan servicing inquiries.

“With the convenience and growth of digital services, financial institutions are recognizing that these customer shifts are likely to be long-lasting. At the same time, major shake-ups to historic workplace models mean the industry must overcome inherent challenges of remote and hybrid work in order to maintain productivity and customer satisfaction,” states Matthew Lehman, Industry Principal for Financial Services at RingCentral. “For financial institutions to remain competitive, they need to focus on both the customer and employee sides of the equation, and a unified communications platform as part of a broader digital transformation strategy is a good way to meet the challenge.”

Real-life gains for RingCentral financial services customers

Our survey asked 189 RingCentral financial services customers about the real-life gains they’re experiencing from deploying our all-in-one messaging, video, and phone (MVP™) solutions and our Contact Center solutions, and the findings revealed key benefits that address these employee and customer experience pressures.

Some key findings include:

57% increase in employee satisfaction

As a result of the new working realities brought on by COVID, remote and hybrid work can result in unintentional barriers to productivity, including departmental silos and the need for multiple apps to collaborate and share information. RingCentral eliminates many of these pain points and promotes more effective and efficient work, delivering an average 39% increase in employee productivity and a 14% decrease in employee attrition.

37% increase in customer satisfaction

Customers expect seamless, personalized, and fast service across all channels, and customer service has become a key differentiator in the fight to win and retain business across all of financial services. There’s a direct line between the capabilities RingCentral can provide to financial institutions and their ability to meet these growing customer demands, resulting in a 37% boost in customer satisfaction satisfaction (CSat) among financial services organizations that use our solutions.

26% overall ROI

Oftentimes, replacing legacy infrastructure and providing the tools financial services organizations need to better serve customers and employees can be costly—but not necessarily so. Shifting to the cloud can provide significant cost savings, including easier and faster configuration, deployment, and management, as well as reduced hardware spend, all while enabling more productive work. Together these savings and operational efficiencies add up to an average 26% return on investment. 

22% increase in revenue growth

Deploying cloud communications, collaboration, and contact center solutions is not just good for making communications simpler, it is great for driving value and growing revenue across the enterprise. One positive aspect of the COVID pandemic is that it forced financial institutions to speed up their digital transformations almost overnight. As a result, we learned that many customers prefer interacting digitally, and that enlightening trend has ushered in a whole new era of sales and opportunities, especially within organizations embracing UCaaS and modern cloud contact centers. A unified communications platform enables financial institutions to incorporate tools like: 

• CRM platform integrations and calling campaigns 
• Click-to-Dial
• Call transfers, call forwarding, and intelligent routing
• Call analytics and reports

Such tools all help support a more coordinated sales effort and customer service, especially when working together in one unified platform. For example, integrating RingCentral with a CRM platform (such as Salesforce, Zoho, and Hubspot) helps track sales activities and prompts sales reps with a structured and integrated campaign of set touchpoints such as calls, emails, and SMS texts. This supported cadence helps sales reps stay consistent with a sequence of deliberate communications across various channels, leading to higher contact and conversion rates. It also provides management with more accurate data in sales reporting.  

14% decrease in average handle time

The convergence of the pandemic mixed with ever-changing customer expectations has created a perfect storm when it comes to addressing customer experience. With the increased use of contact center solutions, such as AI-enabled chat bots, interactive voice response (IVR), and customer service call centers, financial institutions are faced with the reality of communicating with customers in the way(s) they want to communicate while still resolving customer inquiries and issues quickly and successfully. With RingCentral’s Contact Center solutions, financial institutions see an average 14% decrease in average handle time when it comes to resolving customer inquiries and issues. This equates to better customer experience and better customer retention.

Supporting digital transformation for financial services organizations of any size

To demonstrate the power of RingCentral in supporting financial services organizations in the digital era, there are  no better examples than Altura Credit Union and SCM Insurance. Altura Credit Union is one of the largest credit unions on the West Coast, offering a full suite of banking services—credit cards, home loans, auto loans, checking and savings accounts, investment services, etc.—to more than 160,000 members in counties across Southern California. Altura’s on-prem phone system was over 15 years old and was already showing its limitations when the credit union was serving 80,000 members. But by the time that number had doubled to 160,000, Altura’s contact center teams—as well as the rest of the organization—knew it was time for a more modern phone system. As a member-focused organization, the biggest driver for them to upgrade their telephony was to improve contact center operations. 

By implementing a cloud-based RingCentral Contact Center, Altura’s support operations added flexibility and capabilities it never had before. For example, it solved a serious challenge affecting Altura’s call center agents’ ability to work remotely. According to Turhan Hunt, Altura’s VP of Member Services, “With RingCentral, we can now record every member call, no matter where our agents are, and automatically store the recording securely in the cloud.” 

For SCM Insurance, the largest independent, privately owned provider of claims and risk management services in Canada, mobilizing the company’s huge nationwide team to provide local support after a regional catastrophe was difficult and more expensive than it needed to be. One culprit? SCM’s disjointed network of legacy phone systems. And with 60% of its workforce primarily based in the field, the company also struggled with how to help employees stay connected and productive while on the road.So they turned to RingCentral’s unified communications platform MVP (Message, Video, Phone) to provide a consistent communications system and user experience for all employees.

As Mike Ackroyd, Chief Information Officer for SCM Insurance Services, explains some of the benefits of the new system, “Now we can quickly spin up local numbers for any region affected by a disaster. We can easily provide local phone numbers to our staff that have mobilized to support the disaster—and give the victims reassurance that they’re getting help from someone close by.” 

In addition to helping its clients, SCM Insurance has found its new cloud communications solutions help the company’s own bottom line. Ackroyd goes on to add, “With RingCentral, we’ve reduced our costs by 50% by removing dormant phone numbers and getting our expenses for toll-free and long-distance charges back under control. That’s delivering significant savings for SCM Insurance Services.” 

A closer look at the RingCentral advantage

Throughout our Customer Success blog series, we take a closer look at the RingCentral advantage as indicated by overall survey results and explore some of the specific improvements seen across key business segments and within industry vertical markets.

To learn more about the value RingCentral delivers for financial services organizations across 18 key metrics, download our Customer Success Metrics Survey datasheet now.

Originally published Aug 05, 2022