Improving customer experience in financial services

Silos exist across every industry and every business – and the financial services industry is no exception. While breaking down these silos can benefit any industry, financial services may have the most to gain. 

A 2024 study by J.D. Power found that 13% of bank customers say they are likely to switch institutions in the next 12 months. Additionally fewer than half say they are certain they will remain with their bank in the next year. Among those who say they are likely to switch banks, 26% say they had a poor customer service experience. 

Increasingly, it’s not enough for a bank or credit union to answer the question, “Why bank with us?” They also need to show customers and members why they should continue to work with their institution. 

To both attract and retain customers and members, financial institutions must provide a consistently positive and seamless customer experience. That’s easier with in-person interactions, but those are increasingly rare as more people prefer online and mobile banking (78%).  The problem is that customers aren’t getting everything they want from these online experiences. They still want to be known and understood, as they would from an in-person interaction. 

To make frictionless, personalized digital experiences possible and drive profitability, financial institutions will need to break down the silos standing in their way. 

Why are silos a problem for financial services organizations?

Financial services institutions see many types of silos. Some silos grow up over time and others are created by design to keep sensitive personal and financial information secure. The silos that tend to hurt the customer and member experience most are the data and technology silos that exist within individual departments – making it almost impossible for relevant customer information to pass from one system to another. 

Customers see brands as a whole and expect an experience that’s consistent across departments – whether that’s with customer service, account management, rewards, lending, credit, or wealth management. They also expect that experience to be continuous across channels. With silos, these departments and channels are not integrated – producing disjointed and clunky customer experiences. 

Often technology and data silos are to blame for these poor experiences. Customers may not notice that different business units use different technologies, but they do notice when they get transferred from one channel or department to another and have to repeat their information all over again. That type of experience leads to frustration, erodes trust and can ultimately drive that 13% of customers who are likely to switch institutions.

How can financial services organizations break down silos?

At TTEC Digital, breaking down silos and connecting processes and technologies for a seamless customer experience is what we do. Long ago we realized the importance of connecting the contact center with customer relationship management (CRM), and analytics – and now artificial intelligence. By operating at the nexus of these key technologies and creating intellectual property to bridge gaps, we’re able to help businesses take down their silos. The following are two examples of how we do that. 

Create integrations between technologies

A good example of this silo busting, is work we’ve done for PenFed Credit Union, the United State’s largest federal credit union. PenFed Credit Union needed to move its on-premises voice channels to Genesys Cloud without disrupting the member experience. They also needed their cloud channels to integrate with Salesforce CRM. 

PenFed Credit Union EVP, CIO Joseph Thomas shared, “We have worked with TTEC Digital for over five years, and we are confident they have the expertise with Genesys and with third-party technologies like Salesforce to move our voice channels seamlessly to the cloud while maintaining a positive, omnichannel experience for our valued members and employees.” 

In addition to voice channel migration, TTEC Digital provided integration between Genesys Cloud and Salesforce through TTEC Digital OneView, a proprietary SaaS integration that improves both speed and quality of service through a unified agent experience. OneView is part of TTEC Digital’s Intellectual Property (IP) & Software Engineering practice, which designs and develops technology solutions that enhance customers’ CX platforms with features that advance productivity and the experiences delivered at the nexus of CRM, CCaaS, and AI.

Enable data access across channels

For John Hancock Financial, premier provider of plans for wealth management, life insurance, retirement and other services, they needed to break down channel silos that disrupted agent access to relevant customer data. Specifically, their agents needed access to customer history and data across channels to provide the personalized experience their customers expected. To enable this access and improve the agent experience, John Hancock turned to TTEC Digital and AWS.

Together, AWS and TTEC Digital created a fully functioning Amazon Connect contact center solution as a proof of concept. The teams designed, developed, and deployed the Amazon Connect cloud-based service to support approximately 15 agents, and leveraged Amazon Lex Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to improve John Hancock’s contact center capabilities. This solution integrated with John Hancock’s existing Salesforce CRM, enabling better access to relevant customer data so that agents could provide personalized and consistent service for every caller.

According to Michael McCrillis, IT Director, Enterprise Operations, John Hancock, the work had a direct and positive impact on the customer experience. “At John Hancock, customer experience is everything. When we moved to Amazon Connect with the help of TTEC Digital, we saw a 20-point increase in our net promoter score… that’s a big deal to see that kind of success… it’s everything to us,” McCrillis said.

What's next?

Customers and members expect consistent and positive experiences across every touchpoint in your financial services organization. To deliver on those expectations, you must break down the silos that hinder technology integration and data access. TTEC Digital can help. Over the last 40 years, we’ve invested in deep technical expertise to build seamless connections across the contact center, CRM, and AI & analytics guided by transformative CX strategy and design and augmented by our skills in software engineering and intellectual property.