Chris Brown, CX Consultant, Sector Specialist, Finance, IPI
Within financial services, the pressure to meet rising customer expectations has never been higher. In fact, research shows that a third of customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after just a single bad experience.
When it comes to the Contact Centre, customers today expect seamless, responsive support across every channel. Customers want to move effortlessly between voice, email, chat and social media, without having to repeat themselves or start again. However, meeting the demands of customers and delivering a consistently high-quality service across every channel remains a challenge for many financial organisations today.
An omnichannel approach to customer contact can help meet the customer’s needs, empowering agents with the context they need to deliver consistent service across every touchpoint. It’s a strategy that not only improves the overall customer experience (CX) delivered, but one that also enables financial services firms to operate more efficiently and at scale.
What is omnichannel CX?
At its core, omnichannel CX means more than just offering multiple contact options (like email, chatbots, social media messaging, and video calls). It’s about creating a truly unified journey. A customer might start by asking a question via a chatbot on a website, then seamlessly transition to a human agent via live chat or phone, without ever having to repeat themselves.
Meeting this expectation is no longer optional. Indeed, recent research suggests that over half of consumers now expect consistent interactions across all channels, with almost 90 percent wanting brands to offer seamless, omnichannel support. In reality, very few organisations have reached a place of true omnichannel delivery to their customers, so this represents a great opportunity to differentiate via CX.
Moreover, with increasingly tech-savvy digital-native generations entering the market, an integrated omnichannel strategy is essential. By investing here, financial services firms can align with modern expectations and strengthen loyalty right from the outset.
Why omnichannel CX matters in finance
Adopting an omnichannel approach to CX offers significant advantages for financial services providers looking to strengthen customer relationships, boost operational efficiency, and position the organisation for long-term success. Here are three key benefits to adopting this approach:
1. Gain deeper insight into customer needs
By analysing interactions across platforms like live chat, email, and automated assistants, Contact Centres can identify recurring pain points or service gaps and empower agents to handle them proactively.
Tools like text analytics provide valuable feedback, such as spotting repeat complaints or friction in the customer journey (such as customers needing to repeat themselves across different channels). These insights enable financial services teams to make informed improvements that enhance both satisfaction and efficiency.
2. Meet demand more effectively
Rising customer expectations, high call volumes and resource constraints are challenging Contact Centres across the sector. With traditional voice calls being significantly more expensive than digital alternatives, an over-reliance on this channel is unsustainable.
Omnichannel CX helps spread demand across multiple, lower-cost channels, which reduces the pressure on phone lines and frontline teams. AI-driven tools like chatbots can resolve common queries without agent involvement, while proactive communication through SMS and email helps deflect avoidable inbound contact.
And when human intervention is needed, having integrated systems like CRMs ensures agents have full visibility of the customer’s history, so issues are resolved faster, and the customer doesn’t need to start from scratch, but also, deliver the relevant point of reference to agents without having to verify again with the customer.
3. Strengthen customer retention
Whether it’s voice, chat, email, or social media, customers want to interact on their own terms. If their experience isn’t seamless across these touchpoints, they’re more likely to voice dissatisfaction publicly and take their business elsewhere.
Delivering a consistent, connected experience is vital. Cloud-based customer contact solutions that bring together voice, digital, and social channels enable organisations to meet these expectations without compromising service quality. With customers being more service loyal, frictionless CX is a key battleground for retaining existing customers.
Future-ready service, today
With digitalisation booming and AI innovations rapidly changing our world, customer expectations are constantly changing. Financial service providers can meet this challenge by prioritising an omnichannel customer experience. By doing so, they can satisfy today’s needs and ensure their continued loyalty well into the future.
