The Importance of Securing Early Buy-In from Decision Makers
Securing Early Buy-In: Mirroring the customer service trends evident in retail and other industries, bank and credit union customers are seeking to interact with their financial service providers in new ways. In response, many FinServ organizations are beginning a front-end (and back-end) digital transformation. Choosing the right technology solution for your organization is the first big hurdle, but planning and executing a successful implementation can be a challenge unto itself. One way to ensure that the implementation runs smoothly is by securing early buy-in from the decision-makers in your organization. The Importance of Early Buy-In Not acquiring early buy-in from your key decision-makers could leave you open to the risk of going through lengthy sales-cycles with various FinTech solutions, to ultimately find out that they do not meet the needs of the stakeholders in your organization. This ends up costing you time and slows down your digital transformation process. Early buy-in from decision-makers will ensure you have support throughout the process, allowing for an efficient roll-out of your technology solution. It is in your best interests to start by assessing the needs of each stakeholder before you start the sales cycle for a new technology implementation. This way, the implementation process becomes much easier, increasing the pace at which your new implementation can be up and running with the support from ‘higher-ups’ within your organization. Of course, bringing the solution to the attention of decision-makers early on in the process is one thing, but securing buy-in is another. Here are some ways your organization can gain support for your next technology investment. Highlight the Operational Inefficiencies to Solve The first step in securing buy-in from stakeholders is to bring operational inefficiencies to their attention. A significant part of any technology implementation is to correctly identify the issues affecting the operational process within your organization. By doing so, you will be able to choose an implementation that will effectively tackle what’s going wrong, and will also improve key processes. Bringing these issues to the attention of decision-makers within your organization will help garner support for a new technology implementation. Issues that affect the customer experience and reduce efficiency mean the loss of revenue for your organization, and as soon as you highlight and emphasize issues that are currently affecting company revenue, decision-makers will be more likely to invest their support in a new solution. Pitch a Solution, Not the Product After highlighting the areas within your organization that are in need of an upgrade, it is wise to pitch the benefits of the new solution rather than the product itself. As an example, let’s say that your organization is experiencing long contact handle times in its contact center, causing customers who are trying to book an appointment to drop off the line. And once appointments are booked, your customer-facing staff are seeing high no-show rates, in part because you have no way to send automated reminders or calendar invites for appointments. To solve these issues, you have decided to implement integrated appointment scheduling in your organization. Pitching the implementation as a product look like this – “Integrated appointment scheduling will be beneficial to our organization, as it has many features that will enhance our operational processes, such as: The ability to track appointment analytics within our organization. Integration with our CRM and give customer-facing staff insight into customer history with our organization. Sending custom branded follow-up emails after appointment completion. Integration into our online platforms, giving customers 24/7, self-serve appointment scheduling.” Yes, these are the benefits that come with integrated appointment scheduling, but they are not what you need to highlight to secure buy-in from stakeholders. Rather, we recommend cutting to the chase and instead, highlight how the solution will help you solving problems that you’re currently experiencing. Pitching the implementation as a solution to the organization’s operational issues looks like this – “Integrated appointment scheduling is the right solution for our organization, as it has many features that will address the inefficiencies we are experiencing in our scheduling process. It will allow us to enhance the customer experience and improve operational processes, such as: Integrating all appointment scheduling applications into one platform. Streamlining the appointment scheduling process for our contact center representatives and significantly reducing contact handle time by having all applications on one platform. Automatically sending confirmation emails to customers after they have booked their appointment through the contact center. Using notifications to remind customers of their appointment to reduce the number of no-shows.” Know the Solution & Paint the Picture Highlighting the benefits of your ideal solution is beneficial, but drawing out how it will fit into your organization makes the idea more tangible, and increases your chances of buy-in. This is different from listing the features that will help solve the issues affecting your organization and is more of a “picture this” approach. Let’s say you have listed the benefits of an integrated appointment scheduling solution, but you still don’t have complete buy-in from your stakeholders. Now is the paint a picture of what the solution would look like in your organization. Describe Your Current State “Here is a breakdown of what currently happens in our contact center when a client tries to book an appointment: First Hold: Customer calls into the branch and is placed on hold for the next available representative. Basic details: Once the customer gets through to the representative, they are asked for their basic personal information, and what service they need. Second Hold: Customer is placed on hold for the second time while the contacts center representative searches through multiple platforms to find the necessary information to book the appointment. Checking branch locations: The representative searches for the nearest branch to the customer, typically using a geolocator. Searching available, qualified staff: Then the representative has to search through an extensive list of employees who work at that branch location to try and find an advisor who is qualified to conduct the service the customer requires. Checking staff availability: The contact
5 Benefits of Digitizing Your Back-End Process
Organizations are scrambling to stay ahead of their competitors in the finance industry, with digitizing the back-end process being at the forefront of innovation. However, 87% of financial organizations don’t believe their current core systems can keep pace with customer-facing initiatives. And with 60% of customer dissatisfaction originating from the back-end of financial organizations, it’s clear that inefficient back-end processes can have a negative impact on customer experience. Complex legacy IT systems, manual paper-based processes and orphaned data sources often result in high costs, poor agility, plus the customer issues of delayed response-time and lack of a seamless experience. 64% of consumers saying that they expect companies to respond to them in real-time, however, how are they able to correspond with your organization in real-time if your back-end isn’t digitally enabled and ready to respond? Digitizing the back-end process within your financial organization is crucial for the success of customer-facing channels and can have a significant impact on your organization’s potential growth. Ready to learn more about upgrading your institution’s digital presence and capabilities? Download our Ultimate Guide to Digitally Transforming the Appointment Experience today. Improve Customer Experience, Increase Efficiency, Cut Costs One of the key reasons to digitize the back-end is that it enables you to differentiate your customer journey, and offer customers unique benefits such as 24/7 access, real-time responses, and personalized experiences. Other than improving the customer experience, digitizing your back-end process also allows for an increase in efficiency and cut down on costs. Lloyds Banking Group invested in a digital back-end technology that reduced the time it took to do certain processes by 90%. By reducing processes within your organization you will increase efficiency and subsequently boost revenue. According to Capgemini, automating back-end processes can help banks save 30% of their annual costs. From the process to error remediation, to training costs, overall savings can be significant. Digital Optimization Implementations Digitizing your back-end process in order to support your customer-facing channels, improve customer experience and enhance the productivity of your business may sound like an overwhelming undertaking. Where should your organization start? Ideally, you should start by automating one section of the customer journey. You can start by asking yourself a few questions: Which elements of the customer journey require significant manual effort to deploy on the back-end Which elements of the customer journey are resulting in significant customer dissatisfaction? Are there tactical solutions available to automate these manual processes? Which solutions can be implemented quickly to start delivering benefits immediately? One great place to start is your first customer touchpoint: scheduling an appointment. Having appointment scheduling as the first touchpoint means that it is your customers’ first impression of your organization, meaning that you have the opportunity to form a positive relationship with your customers based on the quality of the experience that you provide. Identifying an area in the customer journey in need of change is a great place to start, and implementing a tool that is user-friendly and able to integrate into both customer-facing and back-end processes is an effective first step. The digital transformation occurring in the financial services industry at the moment is relatively new and your organization, as well as your customers, need something that will allow a smooth transition into the future of banking technology. Enterprise appointment scheduling is a tool that enhances customer-facing channels while also streamlining the back-end processes in your organization. It can be implemented organization-wide, into your contact center’s appointment scheduling process, in branch as well as online, providing a new appointment scheduling channel to your customers. This is beneficial to the back-end processes of your organization for multiple reasons such as … Consolidated Customer Behaviour Data Because the channel is integrated organization-wide, every appointment scheduling channel–contact center, branch locations, head office– will have access to the same appointment data. This allows for your organization to speed up the scheduling process because there will be no need to correspond with other employees in other areas of your organization to ensure that no appointments are double booked or missed by advisors because they were not informed of the scheduled appointment. All scheduled appointments and staff availability would be sync across all platforms to ensure appointment scheduling accuracy and that no appointment slots or advisors get double booked due to miscommunication between the two channels. Track Appointment Analytics Integrated appointment scheduling syncs data across all appointment channels in your organization, but also offers your contact center staff the ability to capture additional customer information prior to the appointment, like past financial needs, what brought them to your organization, and who will be attending the appointment. This can help improve the quality of the in-person interaction. Post-appointment, having the ability to track appointment success rate as well as no-show rate allows your organization some insight into valuable sales information around product and services, as well as operational inefficiencies that you can address with a more targeted plan in the future. Coconut Software offers clients a host for appointment analytics which helps highlight friction points in the customer-facing appointment scheduling journey such as: Where in the scheduling process customers are dropping off before submitting the appointment request What branch locations book the most appointments which staff are providing the highest customer satisfaction according to customers. Using the back-end process of enterprise scheduling to track analytics allows your organization the ability to assess the processes it has in place in order to provide the best service possible to its customers. Optimize Staff Times in One Program In large organizations, it can get chaotic to keep track of all of the information on customer-facing staff in order to schedule appointments. You need to track staff availability as well as updated qualifications, and hosting all of your customer-facing employee data on one platform allows your organization to run as smoothly as possible. With enterprise scheduling, you can host advisor data on a platform that is organization-wide and able to be updated in real-time. This enhances the organization within your
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5 Benefits of Appointment Scheduling Software
It’s a jungle out there. These days the competition will take every advantage to break out from the pack. That’s why it’s so important that businesses strongly consider the benefits of appointment scheduling software. According to industry analysts, appointment scheduling software use is projected to grow in business by 9.8% between 2017 and 2021. There’s no denying that appointment scheduling software provides a ton of benefits for your business. But for the lingering skeptics out there, here are 5 ways appointment scheduling software can put companies one step ahead of the competition. Benefit 1. Reach More Customers, In Less Time A customer no-show represents a wasted investment of time and employee resources. And too many no-shows will adversely impact a business. An appointment software helps businesses maintain their competitiveness by reducing no-shows and optimizing the customer service experience. By cutting down on customer wait time, you’ll be reducing their frustration and improving employee performance in one fell swoop. The efficiency of the software also saves employee time, allowing them to service more customers. More customers mean more revenue opportunities for your business, and that’s never a bad thing. Benefit 2. Automated Communication Ensures You Stay in the Loop Most scheduling software packages worth their weight also include automated phone and text reminders for customers. Automated communications ensure that customers never slip through the cracks and also contributes to employee productivity. Benefit 3. Gain Actionable Insights & Analytics In an age where businesses are making major decisions based on customer data, companies can’t afford to be left behind. A premium appointment scheduling software package designed for enterprises allows them to monitor valuable employee productivity and customer data with the push of a button. This provides a better understanding of customers and this knowledge helps drive disruptive, actionable processes in all aspects of the business, from product development to marketing and communications. Benefit 4. Deliver Personalized Experience to Customers In order to stay competitive, it’s critical that businesses take every opportunity to make a good impression on their customers. White label features allows for delivering a personalized customer service experience that is consistent with the company’s brand. In addition, sending tailored email communications and notifications also helps keep a company’s brand top of mind and provides a more holistic experience. Appointment scheduling software gives companies the power to start conversations that customers look forward to coming back to. Benefit 5. Superior Project Management and Efficiency Go Hand in Hand Calendar-syncing, single sign-on, and technical support when needed are some of the important features to look out for when choosing appointment scheduling software. Companies that avoid the upfront investment to use this software risk the possibility of operating inefficiently and leaving revenue on the table for competitors. A centralized customer-oriented scheduling solution helps manage projects efficiently and minimizes bottlenecks by making appointment scheduling quick and easy. The decision to take the leap and invest in an automated solution to customer appointment scheduling requires a lot of consideration. It’s important for businesses to find the right mix of features and cost to fit their specific needs. The ease of appointment scheduling can make you stand out from the competition. The time is now to jump on the bandwagon and get a leg up on the competition before it’s too late. If you’re interested in learning more about the value that online appointment scheduling solutions can add to your business, check out our value report. What’s Next? Interested in learning how appointment scheduling can help your entire organization engage more efficiently and effectively with customers? Download our Customer Experience Whitepaper. Ready to get started? Schedule a consultation today.
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