The financial services sector — banks, credit card companies, loan companies, stockbrokers, financial services advisors and debt collection agencies — has been through a lot in recent years. While recovering from the global financial crisis more than a decade ago, it has experienced consolidation and cost-cutting while also seeing many smaller, more specialized operations enter the market.

Companies rely heavily on their contact centers to help maintain good customer relationships — especially during challenging times. So, it’s more important than ever to address contact center issues. Fortunately, a cloud-based contact center solution can tackle several of these obstacles. Here are five top challenges in financial services call centers.

  1. Remote work

During the COVID-19 pandemic nearly all industries had to quickly pivot to address the global pandemic. The financial services sector is no exception. To continue delivering reliable customer service, it needed to arrange for agents to work from home. Those companies with the flexibility to make the necessary changes had an advantage.

  1. Agent attrition

Agent attrition causes planning headaches, results in a loss of institutional knowledge and throws off a contact center’s budget. The problem is even more prevalent in larger contact centers. And, the US financial services contact centers tend to be about twice as large as the average. Agents quit for a variety of reasons — poor training, an overwhelming workload, having to perform boring and repetitive tasks, and having to work with outdated technology that limits their capabilities.

  1. Complex questions and interactions

Financial services companies typically offer a wide range of services, agents need instant access to detailed information so they can address varied, often complex requests — quickly. Recent rises in self-service, mobile and online banking, online financial product quotes, and comparison sites further add to the complexity in the contact center. And this increases the need for highly skilled agents. In fact, talk times in financial services contact centers are generally longer than the industry average.

  1. Customer engagement

Savvy financial services customers expect experiences that are tailored to their needs and preferences — no matter how they interact with your brand. Mobile apps and web chat features are more popular in financial services contact centers than in other industries. And, recently, some banks have shown an interest in video agents, too — especially for high net-worth customers. At a time when it’s relatively easy for customers to switch to the competition, keeping them engaged with a top-quality experience in the channel they prefer is critical.

  1. Integration with third-party and other in-house apps

Companies without the end-to-end management often struggle to manage the entire customer journey effectively. Agents don’t have visibility into customer interactions across the spectrum of channels offered. That not only creates inefficiencies, it frustrates customers and agents alike.

Make the Right Cloud Investment 
The right cloud contact center platform can address all of these challenges — and more.

During times of rapid change, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, an all-in-one, secure and scalable cloud contact center solution empowers your agents to adjust to changes quickly — scaling up or down, as needed. In addition, a cloud platform lets agents work in different capacities and in a variety of channels. Offloading repetitive tasks to a chatbot keeps agents engaged and lets them focus on higher-value responsibilities.

An open, flexible architecture drives customer engagement by offering access to the latest innovations in a single, modern platform. And by unifying all communication channels, interactions and work items through automated routing, the right cloud platform lets you design, monitor and tune the entire customer journey.

Read this report from ContactBabel to learn more about trends in financial services contact centers. And find out how an all-in-one cloud-based solution like the Genesys Cloud™ platform can take your financial services customer experience to the next level.