Banks must simplify call centre agent environment

Guy Tweedale, senior vice-president of Jacada, has commented on recent Which? research that revealed that some of the banks bailed out by taxpayers are providing poor customer service.

For banks facing a troubled economy, good customer service is even more important than ever, especially as loyalty and customer satisfaction/retention are so critical to the banks right now.

In that context, the recent Which? survey results are particularly significant.

With call centre staff now the main point of contact for many of the banks' customers, the cause of such poor customer service scores - and frustrated customers - is often the result of the chaos and pressure that UK customer service agents find themselves under these days.

Efforts by the banks to improve service levels and operational efficiency in the contact centre are severely hampered by the complexity of the agents' working environment, so in order to help agents become more effective, banks need to look at simplifying their core processes and deliver an enterprise-level view of a customer across multiple systems and customer records.

After all, with increasing operational consolidation of financial services organisations, it's quite likely that a customer might deal with one company for many services - for example banking, credit, loans, mortgages and insurance.

The customer needs to have a seamless service experience across all of these areas if they are to continue using them.

The reason many of our leading financial institutions are not scoring highly in terms of customer satisfaction is that it is impossible for the agent to provide that sort of experience.

From the IVR system that annoys and frustrates customers to the many systems that the agents need to use to manage and complete calls, the agents are being hampered by the very technology organisations have put in place to help facilitate their business.

The level of service customers expect - and increasingly demand - relies on having the right information about the customer at the right time.

Yet, the customer service agents in these banks have to use a combination of old legacy systems and those that have been designed and developed over many years to meet the needs of specific lines of business or departments (finance, billing, marketing) - not with the needs of customer interaction in mind.

So it is not surprising that it is almost impossible for the long-suffering agent to navigate through the various screens from which they need to access data in all of those systems, while chatting amiably with the customer, trying to rectify their problems.

This has a profoundly negative affect on the customer experience, and in turn leads to the type of findings identified by this survey.

By simplifying the environment in which call centre staff work - specifically their customer service desktop - and giving them the tools they need to do their job properly (talk to customers, fix their problems, establish a meaningful relationship, and so on), the banks should be able to provide an extremely high standard of customer service, improve satisfaction levels and, ultimately, re-emphasise and re-personalise the positives in their brand identity.

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