Sabio highlights key factors impacting customer experience in financial services contact centres

Identifies multiple agent logons, complex application navigation and poor process enforcement as barriers to great customer experience

Recommends financial services firms adopt Desktop Detox approach to help streamline the number of applications and ‘non-value’ processes that their agents have to work with and reduce the cost of service by up to 30%

LONDON – 1 November, 2007 – Sabio, the innovative contact centre services and solutions company, has identified what it believes are the three key factors that consistently impact great customer experience in financial services sector contact centres. According to Sabio, contact centre agents have to spend far too much time logging onto different internal systems and jumping between applications, keeping callers waiting on the phone. This is a direct result of the complexity agents face when having to use anything between five and ten separate IT applications when trying to meet the day-to-day needs of their banking or insurance customers.

Sabio’s research shows that today’s standard financial services ‘agent desktop’ typically features a minimum of five different applications, ranging from Customer Accounts, CRM, Product Information and Payment systems to Legal & Compliance scripts, Quotation systems, Insurance Claims and calls on data stored in sister or acquired company applications. This figure doesn’t even include standard office applications that add to the complexity, such as email, Web browsers and word processing systems. Research from analyst firm ContactBabel suggests that non-value activities such as basic system navigation and data collection now accounts for 31 per cent of overall call times.

“As consumers we’re all familiar with agents who tell us that the ‘system’s running a bit slow today’ or that ‘we don’t have your record to hand’, but the reality for most major financial services organisations is that their multiple applications simply aren’t sufficiently integrated to allow agents to do the job they’re asked to do. It’s one of the reasons why it’s not surprising that financial services contact centres have the second lowest caller satisfaction rating out of all sectors according to a recent ContactBabel survey,” commented Sabio Director, Adam Faulkner. “Effectively agents are being left to handle application integration during the call, and it’s not unusual for what seem like simple tasks to involve five or more separate applications, 20 different process steps and nine system swap-overs. Clearly that presents lots of opportunity for error, and this probably explains why up to 50 per cent of agent training time is spent on basic IT tasks rather than on customer service skills.

“However, we have to recognise that in today’s ultra-competitive financial services market - defined by globalisation and consolidation -the financial services applications landscape is likely to get more, rather than less complicated,” he continued. “So if financial services contact centres are looking for an answer to their over-complex agent desktops, it’s going to have to be an approach that doesn’t compromise their existing core business systems, and which effectively de-couples the agent interface from existing front and back-end systems. Fortunately that’s where our Sabio Intelligent Desktop approach can help.”

30 per cent agent productivity improvements

Sabio recommends that by detoxing the agent desktop – or streamlining the number of different IT applications that financial services agents have to work with – banks and insurance companies can create a new generation of clean and intuitive desktops and potentially increase their agent productivity by an average of 30 per cent. Using some of the latest user interface and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) techniques, the Sabio Intelligent Desktop helps organisations to optimise their agent user interface and implement best practice templates to speed up operational processes.

The Sabio Intelligent Desktop starts by mapping the customer experience and the agent experience, and then designs composite, role-specific agent desktops that can be easily tuned to each organisation’s own requirements. For financial services organisations, for example, process templates can be created that deliver the exact sequences of agent steps needed to ensure regulatory compliance, or that highlight the optimum timing for cross- and up-selling effectiveness. Sabio’s focus is always on increasing the ratio of ‘value’ to ‘non-value’ components of interactions, and providing financial services organisations with the components needed to offer a consistent customer service view.

A typical Sabio Intelligent Desktop solution for financial services would comprise:

• Sabio contact centre best practice process templates – developed by Sabio to deliver clear, linear, end-to-end processes that help banks and insurance companies deliver more effective customer service from a user-centred perspective.
• Sabio Intelligent Desktop composite user interface (UI) – powered by Corizon – which creates a virtual agent application made up of a combination of re-usable UI components including data and services from core enterprise applications as well as Sabio-optimised contact centre services. The Sabio Intelligent Desktop features a number of consistent UI presentation elements including, for example, always-visible customer information, context-sensitive process information, and a real-time agent tickertape display providing updates on numbers of calls, average handling time and sales statistics.
• Core enterprise applications data and services – using Corizon and Attachmate technology to integrate data and logic from an organisation’s existing packaged and legacy applications, including mainframe, Windows and multiple web solutions. This enables the creation of agile financial services applications without compromising a firm’s existing business critical applications.
• Sabio Contact Centre Services - an expanding library of contact centre application services that build on Sabio’s extensive market expertise to deliver functionally specific applications that address core contact centre processes such as ID&V (Identification and Verification), Customer Contact History and Compliance support.