In today’s rapidly evolving financial landscape, call centers play a critical role in providing exceptional customer service, generating leads, and expanding books of business. However, financial services call centers face a unique set of challenges that require innovative solutions.
Below, we delve into the top challenges facing financial services call centers and explore the top technology solutions available to help teams overcome these obstacles and deliver growth in 2023.
From personnel issues to software performance, there’s no shortage of obstacles facing all types of financial services call centers today. To understand the most common issues and pinpoint the most effective solutions, we dug into the data and drew on our own extensive experience in the industry.
Here are the top five financial call center challenges:
High turnover among agents is by no means a new problem for call centers. But that doesn’t diminish its impact. In a survey of financial services call centers, the #2 and #3 biggest issues were attrition and the resulting lack of staff to handle workloads.
In the wider calling industry, data around agent burnout and stress in the call center are downright alarming. Solving these primary drivers of attrition issues requires investments in employee engagement and, as we’ll cover below, the right technology solutions.
Among the top issues faced by agents on the job is an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Even after a seemingly positive ruling by the US Supreme Court in the case of Facebook v. Duguid, lead gen and sales teams have seen a growing pile-up of calling regulations and privacy legislation at the state level.
As states like Florida, Oklahoma, Washington, and Michigan pass so-called mini-TCPA laws and others draft consumer privacy laws, financial services call centers must navigate a patchwork of rules to remain compliant across all the jurisdictions they serve. Without the right tools, it can be quite the headache. Or worse—it can cost call centers big.
As compliance regulations have evolved, it’s created more than just legal hoops to jump through. With the rollout of STIR/SHAKEN protocols, telco carriers now have more power than to label calls as spam- or scam-likely, or simply block calls altogether. As a result, most call centers in financial services and beyond have seen their contact rates fall to all-time lows. Without intelligent dialing strategies and helpful tech solutions in place, this challenge can spiral into an outright threat to the health of the business.
Another consequential issue for financial services call centers in the survey cited above was “poor cross-departmental collaboration.” This is likely unsurprising to anyone familiar with sales and lead gen. For some organizations, in fact, this is perhaps the biggest challenge they face: bringing the full power of their organization to bear on the sales process.
From customer service to marketing, disparate aspects of a financial services organization all have unique insights. Collecting those insights and leveraging them for growth is often another story, of course.
While cultural issues can cause the formation of information silos, this widespread issue is also a technological one.
It’s no surprise, then, that the #1 challenge reported by financial services call centers is a lack of tools—or at least a lack of good tools. In fact, an absence of the right tech can be seen at the heart of each of the challenges we’ve covered so far.
So, then, what is the right tech for today’s financial call centers? Look no further than the following solutions to the biggest issues in the industry.
The need for omnichannel capabilities is so pressing that survey participants frequently named a lack of multichannel communications as its own substantial challenge.
However, a lack of omnichannel is at its core a technology problem, in addition to being an issue of strategy, with wide-reaching consequences. By implementing omnichannel strategies, call centers not only enable more avenues for successful customer outreach (and intake), but they can potentially ease burdens (and burnout) for their agents.
With intelligent outreach campaigns that incorporate text and email channels alongside dialing cadences, financial service teams can greatly improve their contact rates—and give agents chances to make sales. And as we’ve seen time and again with outbound teams, with better talk time comes better agent morale.
AI-powered solutions are also available to ease the pressure on agents and help them spend more of their time doing what they want to do—making sales and solving customer issues.
The latest Intelligent virtual agent (IVA) technology can deliver automated, omnichannel communications alongside live agents with remarkable fluency, whether it’s dialing aged leads or assisting with appointment-setting and customer self-service. Meanwhile, AI-driven quality assurance tools can monitor more calls and make it easier to provide agents with personalized coaching, feedback, and support.
Speaking of support, why not give financial call center agents software that makes it easier for them to stay on message and avoid compliance slip-ups? Dynamic scripting software delivers automated, personalized scripts that respond in real time as agents progress through customer conversations. Whether it’s used to help teams convert more leads or more easily solve customer issues, dynamic scripting can simplify training, speed up onboarding times, and help organizations cope with the effects of agent turnover.
Ultimately, all of these solutions rely on having the right financial services dialer software to bring them all together. However, beyond additional advanced features, the dialer itself needs to make the grade as well. Without the power to dial more leads, make more contacts, and keep financial agents in a groove as they work the phones, teams are short of the ideal solution for their call center.
Your dialer software is the engine that powers your call center. So, don’t settle for second-best—for your business or your agents. Schedule a free demo and see the difference Convoso’s leading dialer solution can make for your financial services business.
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Convoso is a leading CCaaS contact center software provider for sales and lead generation teams. Since 2006, Convoso has remained at the forefront of innovation, consistently developing solutions to foster customer growth while supporting adherence to regulatory standards. Its omnichannel capabilities include conversational AI game-changer Voso.ai to scale sales and revenue further.
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