Industry Overview

The financial sector faces a complex range of market issues: a period of mergers and consolidation has made brand protection a key concern, while institutions in the sector need to efficiently handle high levels of call volumes with complex product portfolios.

The financial services sector is a highly competitive arena, in which brand differentiation is a further major factor. While each institution’s individual portfolio can be rich in products, it can be difficult for customers to differentiate between available rival offerings. As customer service becomes a key competitive factor, the challenge is to balance the retention of competitive edge with the management of operational costs, all the while looking to reduce customer churn and to win customers from competitors.

For consumer-facing financial institutions, these business critical issues often come to bear at the point where the customer most often meets the enterprise – over the phone. Voice communication is still the sector’s single biggest business channel, so any new development that can improve customer experience while delivering efficiency gains to the institution has to be worthy of serious investigation.

The problem

Few large financial institutions are aware of just how far speech applications have developed in recent years. Not only do some still deploy technologies that are showing their age, but there is also a common - if outdated - perception that speech applications, and the infrastructure needed to run them, are hugely expensive. In fact, speech applications, along with the tools to build and manage them and the servers that run them, are all much less expensive (and far more standardised and reliable) than a decade ago,

So why do so many of us still find so many call centres such a nightmare to experience? (If you don’t believe this is an issue, take a brief look at www.gethuman.com, which may change your mind.) Financial services institutions are becoming seen by many customers as distant and uncaring: in many cases, they have gradually removed much of the ‘human factor’ from a traditionally very ‘face-to-face’ business (there are, after all, not many things that many people consider more personal than their own finances), replacing people with often badly designed systems.

As financial institutions increasingly have a wider portfolio of products to sell (such as mortgage and insurance products) and are doing so across longer hours of business (with customers increasingly expecting a 24x7 service), this is an issue that they are increasingly anxious to address in order to build customer loyalty and avoid the expense of constant churn.

However, many of them feel that they are trapped in a web of semi-automated processes, where the process of building a satisfactory customer relationship is inhibited by relatively low-level communications infrastructure: this problem is also often seen within institutions as representing an immoveable object. Where existing interactive voice platforms have failed to keep up with developments in the CRM world, customer and relationship data and the related knowledge held in institutions’ databases is also frequently inaccessible during communication with customers - unless a live agent is involved to manage the process.

Most financial institutions fail to undertake or achieve real hands-on management of the telephony interface, usually passing responsibility to external specialists. As a result, they typically find it extremely difficult to move forward: despite the high-speed technology and deployment strategies now available, even changing a simple voice prompt, for example, can take many weeks. Outsourcing voice services to service providers can help to achieve quicker results – but institutions then have to pay not just the literal price of doing so, but also the additional business cost of loss of control.

The way forward

Today, voice services can be built and managed separately from the infrastructure on which they run, allowing them to be altered at will without fear of system reconfiguration or downtime. Indeed, all of these tasks can be managed on a desktop computer.

The latest tools mean that services can now be built in a fraction of the time previously experienced: a new service can be built and tested in a matter of days rather than months, and redesigned many times until it works exactly as it should. Indeed, many can be constructed from base software components that can be reused at will. The ability to dynamically change client interaction and present pertinent information ‘on-the-fly’ is also now a reality.

In fact – just like the web - the speech application world is no longer the sole domain of technical specialists. Advanced solutions can be designed to be managed directly by the businesses that use them. This in turn means that their customers will experience up to date messages and get to their business destination quicker – and help themselves to an ever-increasing degree.

Keeping the customer

As customers become ever more discerning in their understanding of financial services (and, where the reality doesn’t meet their expectations, disenfranchised by their current service experience as a result), banks and financial institutions are increasingly prone to customers voting with their feet.

They can help to overcome this risk through the adoption of better quality speech solutions that personalise client communications and open the way to a range of new and valuable processes. Simple communication enhancements include, for example:

• Service analytics (understanding what services are being accessed, by whom and when)
• Service tuning (real time correction of failed or misused call paths)
• Customer profiling and access back to clients via CLI (caller identification)
• Multi-channel access (web, mobile, fixed line) and programmed access
• Personalisation (fast track services and personal preference options)
• Self service, customer preferences and customer profiling (remembering their preferences)
• Self-profiling (client-declared interests)

These elements are all highly significant in improving the customer relationship, and the use of advanced tools can incorporate these features as an important starting point in improving relationship management. A strong service-building environment that is operated and controlled by financial institutions themselves, with some external help, is an important way to get closer to the customer while protecting and improving branding and uniqueness of service.

Vicorp xPress™ speech solutions

xPress™ addresses the issues of intelligently managing a client and providing pertinent information in any format at the right time and place, enabling organisations to build a relationship whose qualities are experienced each time a client makes contact.

Vicorp deliver an end-to-end solution that enables organisations to address their voice services in a complete manner. Vicorp also works with a number of partners across the globe to deliver the same level of quality worldwide.

Vicorp uses its own highly advanced development tools and platforms to deliver voice services and solution: its xMP product suite is the leading independent Service Creation environment available in the market.

Vicorp provides all the tools and a runtime framework for assembling, deploying, delivering and managing dynamic communication services. Single and multi-channel application environments are available that strongly support Service Creation, reuse, development and extension by non-technical people. Vicorp also builds sample services, prototypes, proof of concept services and full production services to any scale, running on any infrastructure.