UK financial services organisations will invest in ‘cheaper’ ways to engage customers in 2013

Contact centres operating in the consumer financial services industry are planning to win the customer experience/cost battle with web-based customer engagement and self-service, according to new research from Aspect.

Aspect’s latest industry study asked 150 senior business and IT decision makers in financial services about their challenges, goals and barriers to adoption of technology and multi-channel customer engagement. The majority of the organisations surveyed see improving the customer experience as a primary business goal (56 per cent), while most also want to reduce cost by implementing new technology (68 per cent), but are blocked by CAPEX investments (60 per cent cited this as the biggest barrier to adoption).

With tighter budgets, however, has come more intelligent contact centres responding to the changing communications habits of consumers, with one in five organisations surveyed planning to implement instant messaging/web chat (19 per cent) and/or online self-service (19 per cent) in 2013. With the customer experience in mind, organisations are also keeping compliance and data security absolutely at the top of their agendas, with 51 per cent and 46 per cent claiming these as top technology concerns respectively.

“Contact centres operating in the highly regulated financial services industry are presented with some difficult choices,” comments Peter Nicol, VP Northern Europe at Aspect. “Despite 94 per cent of respondents claiming that customer service is the primary objective, they aren’t just functional customer service outlets but real assets adding real business and strategic value, and not just in terms of sales. The research reveals some encouraging findings, particularly that only one in five respondents claim that being seen as a cost centre is a barrier to technology adoption.

“Understandably for financial services organisations, compliance, security, privacy are all top technology concerns for respondents. It’s a complex compliance landscape for contact centre managers; not only are they dealing with Ofcom rules on handling sometimes thousands of customer interactions a day, but also data protection laws and industry-specific regulations such as those from the Financial Services Authority,” he adds.

One key aspect of the research also indicated that organisations are getting better at squeezing additional value out of the contact centre through customer interaction. According to Aspect’s research, only 17 per cent of contact centres currently use voice analytics, but it is one of the fastest-growing technologies, with a further 13 per cent planning to implement it.

To explore further how consumers feel about the service they receive and wish to receive from their banks and insurance providers, download the full report here.