Richard Mill Managing Director of Business Systems (UK) Ltd, a specialist in providing call recording and workforce optimisation solutions
Business Systems’s Richard Mill explains how applying analytical intelligence to processes in the financial services industry can benefit customers, employees and also the bottom line
The contact centre is now a critical part of any financial services business. It provides real visibility over your operations – helping to iron out any inefficiencies, manage organisational costs and ensure you are meeting your customer experience (CX) promises and overall business goals.
Turning data into valuable insight to provide a total picture of the customer journey is paramount in today’s digital economy. It assists financial services companies in ramping up sales, maintaining compliance, reducing budgets, increasing customer retention and retaining customer loyalty. All imperative in a highly competitive industry. Equiniti, the UK’s leading provider of share registration services and associated investor schemes, has shown how it has turned its data into valuable, actionable insight using the right tools and processes that are helping the firm stay one step ahead.
Amongst its business interests, Equiniti provides administration services for employee share plans, pensions and employee benefits schemes. Annually, its Customer Experience Centre helps over 2.6 million customers with 88 million documents and processes £90bn in payments.
To maintain its consistently high levels of service, harvest enhanced customer insight and optimise processes going forward the company opted to deploy a speech analytics solution, Nexidia, from Business Systems. Speech analytics uses algorithms to sift through vast volumes of call data to glean customer information to improve communication and future interactions. Often it can uncover issues that companies don’t realise they have.
Voice analytics: a route to improving performance
This software tool has been in use by Equiniti for some time, and it quickly saw the fruit of its investment. The solution now plays a central role in spotting issues and processes in the Customer Experience Centre that can be quickly enhanced for smart decision making.
One of the first areas it addressed was the share dealing service, where it found customer confusion resulted in the process not delivering on first point of resolution. Using voice analytics findings, Equiniti was able to re-work the process, reduce call lengths from 5 minutes to 3 minutes and provide a much improved CX.
The analytics system also spotted an issue with Equiniti’s share dealing account. As a result the company has been able to streamline its direct debit capabilities, improve customer CX and reduce process maintenance.
In addition to helping improved processes, analytics has provided Equiniti with far greater insight into the productivity of its agents. Honing in on KPIs such as non-talk time and wasted time on calls, Equiniti has managed to identify how many calls have such issues. It has also allowed cost values to be put against these calls in terms of agent time. This has allowed the company to generate far more accurate financial return figures.
The importance of listening to your customers
An added bonus is the solution’s ability to allow Equiniti to offer up a customer survey at the end of every call. This provides Equiniti further insight into customer interactions which can be used for all important competitive advantage.
Compliance monitoring and performance monitoring have also enabled Equiniti to better understand agent coaching needs while creating a library of real life practice scenarios. As a result, last year Equiniti delivered approximately 30,000 improved customer experiences based on the data generated by Speech Analytics. This created a 2% increase in customer satisfaction scores and an increase in Net Promoter Score from 48 to 51.
Using Speech Analytics has given Equiniti valuable business intelligence in the way its customers interact with the company, allowing it to better serve its customers, improve relationships and increase sales.
