The Branch is Convenient, But Customers Want More
Despite the ongoing shift toward digital services and distancing banking, the branch is far from dead. That said, customers are increasingly expecting a seamless experience when switching between the convenient digital tools they use every day and the branch environment they trust for their most important financial matters.
How to Attract and Retain Millennial Customers in 2020
As the first generation to be raised with the absolute ease of technology – the norm of face-to-face interactions for banks and credit unions has shifted. Because of this, banks and credit unions face a difficult challenge; how do you attract and retain millennial customers who want to minimize interaction, and crave an enhanced digital experience. For those up to meeting this challenge – it could signify their greatest opportunity for growth. Over the next 10 years, 75% of customers seeking wealth management and personal financial services will be millennials. This is a concerning statistic for many finserv organizations since the millennial customer shows a number of differences in the way they prefer to interact with organizations compared to older generations. We will discuss the differences in how to communicate with a millennial customer and how an appointment management solution can help attract the up and coming generation and reduce churn. How can Coconut Software upgrade your institution’s digital presence and capabilities? Download the Ultimate Guide to Digitally Transforming the Appointment Experience today. Attract and Retain Millennial Customers – The Challenges 1. Millennials Have Higher Customer Service Expectations Millennials have grown up in the midst of the digital transformation and are used to the benefits that come with it. The digital experience has enabled many industries to increase the quality of the services they provide in terms of customer experience, and millennials have become accustomed to premium treatment. Financial Services is one of the oldest industries in the world, and also one of the last to begin the digital transformation. This is causing the millennial customer to seek out businesses that provide them with convenient digital service that they desire. 2. Millennials Prefer to Interact With Brands Digitally Millennials are a digital-centric generation, meaning they rely strongly on technology in their daily life, specifically their smartphones. Millennials expect immediate, online access to their finserv provider, whereas older generations were very comfortable picking up the phone or waiting for their service provider to get back to them. Millennial customers, more than other generation, are asking themselves, “if I can schedule a massage, order groceries and buy flights online, why can’t I book an appointment with my bank?” 3. Millennials Won’t Stay Loyal Just Because You Have a History Millennials are 2 to 3 times more likely to change service providers than any other generation. They are used to a digital experience with enhanced customer service, and they are not worried about leaving a current provider for an organization that meets all of their needs. And soon, those customers will make up the majority of the workforce. In fact, 30% of millennials report they have left their current bank or credit union because they found another finserv organization that provided a better experience. Attract and Retain Millennial Customers – How Appointment Management Solutions Help The increasing demands of the millennial customer are concerning to the legacy structure of the finserv industry, however, there are ways to keep the value of your business interactions while implementing solutions to attract the growing population of millennial customers and reduce churn. An appointment management tool offers multiple solutions to your millennial customer problem. 1. Improve Customer Experience With New Insight Into Customer Behavior When your organization leverages an appointment management solution, you will gain additional insight into the customer’s behavior and history with your organization. When you have an integrated scheduling platform, your customer-facing staff can access all the information collected during the appointment-booking. This will allow them to prepare for their upcoming appointment with the customer, enabling them to provide the enhanced customer experience the millennial customer craves. 2. Give Your Customers What They Want With Real-Time Online Appointment Scheduling With an integrated appointment management solution, you can offer real-time, 24/7 online appointment scheduling. This will allow your customers to schedule in-person interactions with your organization whenever and wherever they want, minimizing human interactions with your organization, which the millennial customer loves to avoid. Additionally, when your customers book appointments online, they will also receive reminders on their smartphones, which the average millennial checks about 43 times a day, reducing the chances of no-show appointments. 3. Keep Customers Loyal With Direct Feedback With an appointment management solution, your organization can send out automated follow-up emails to customers to gain feedback on the experience they had. People love to be asked their opinion, and asking your customers about their experience with your organization will make them feel valued and earn you major brownie points. We know millennials are less loyal than previous generations, but we also know customers who feel their financial services provider listens to their needs are more likely to remain loyal to that brand. Following-up with millennial customers and asking about the experience they had with your organization makes them feel like their opinion matters. Streamlining the digital experience up to the in-person interaction, while leveraging technology to provide a premium experience, will set your organization apart. Millennials are a completely new type of customer for the FinServ industry, and by leveraging a digital experience, your organization will be able to provide the services the millennial customer desires in order to attract new business and reduce churn. Discover A Modern Way to Engage Get In Touch What Next? Ready to learn more about upgrading your institution’s digital presence and capabilities? Download our Ultimate Guide to Digitally Transforming the Appointment Experience today. Looking to boost revenue and deliver a premium experience to your clients? Schedule a consultation with Coconut Software to learn more about how our appointment scheduling solutions can get you there.
4 Fintech Innovations for Creating Deeper Connections
The top 4 tech innovations in fintech emerging are turning casual bankers into devoted customers. How can banks and credit unions benefit from this trend?
Manage the Walk-In Appointment Journey
Give your customer experience and branch performance a boost with Coconut Lobby Management. The ‘phigital’ solution to mapping the customer journey.
Banking on Millennials
Learn how the growing generation of millennials is changing the world of finance in our latest infographic “Banking on Millennials.”
When Channel Switching Interrupts the Customer Journey
Looking to optimize the customer experience? Stop forcing clients to switch channels. Provide a personalized, intelligent experience with Coconut Software.
Balancing Millennials and Boomers in a Self-Service Era
Looking for a self-service digital solution to improve customer experience for Millennials and Boomers? There’s more common ground than most banks realize.
3 Ways Credit Unions Can Connect With Millennials
Katherine Regnier, CEO and Founder of Coconut Software highlights the three key methods Credit Unions can use to connect with millennials.
Why Integrate CRM With Your Appointment Management Solution
Appointment management software plays a critical role in any organizations digital transformation. To get the most out of your solution, integrating your CRM software is a necessity. Doing so avoids a disjointed operations and a silo’d workforce, not to mention setting your organization up for future success. If you choose to implement and integrate a appointment management solution with your business CRM, you’ll want to ensure both applications provide an open API. This will allow your business to integrate both systems and experience the ultimate benefits of enhancing your operational processes. The Risks of Not Integrating Your CRM If your organization chooses a appointment management solution that does not provide integration options, you are placing yourself at an increased risk of slowing down operational processes, increasing informational gaps, and creating a disjointed customer experience. Impact on Operational Processes The information necessary for appointment management appointments, that also has to be stored in your CRM application, will require duplicate data entry if your appointment management solution is not integrated with your business CRM. This is going to be a nightmare for staff responsible for recording customer information, as they’ll have to re-input data that already exists in another application. And it will cost your organization money due to wasted staff time. Duplicate data entry is also problematic since it leaves room for error when an individual is asked to manually transfer information from one application to another. Disjointed Customer Experience Not integrating your appointment management solution with your CRM application may mean you are inadvertently delivering a disjointed customer experience. At the time of the appointment scheduling, your customer can give additional insight into their needs, and what they hope to accomplish in their upcoming appointment. But, if up-to-date information is not available when your customer-facing staff check the scheduling system to gain insight into a customer’s needs, they’ll end up working with outdated or no information at all. If you were the customer who scheduled an appointment with your financial services provider, imagine how frustrating it would be to answer several questions during the appointment scheduling, only to find out their advisor doesn’t have access to that information. Now, they have to answer the same questions again, since their advisor prepared for the appointment based on outdated information. Process without a CRM, appointment scheduling integration in your contact center Individual contacts your organization to book an appointment Contact center representative asks the individual for their basic information Contact center representative has no idea if the individual is a current or new customer Contact center representative has to input all the customer’s information to schedule the appointment Once the appointment is scheduled, the representative has to log into your business CRM to manually input this information for the second time, taking up time and leaving room for error Process with a CRM, appointment scheduling integration Individual contacts your organization to book an appointment Contact center representative asks the individual for their basic information Contact center representative can see if the individual is a current or new customer If the individual is a new customer, the information put into the scheduling system will also be saved to your organization’s CRM If they are a returning customer, the CRM will be able to populate the fields in the scheduling system, saving time for both the call center representative and the customer The result is a more streamlined reporting and back-end process The 3 Benefits of Integrating CRM When you are an appointment driven business, you want to ensure you are providing a premium experience to your customers, so they want to continue working with you. Integrating your appointment management solution with your CRM will enable your institution to communicate more effectively with your clients, streamline operational processes and improve communication. 1. Streamline Operational Processes Having a single, integrated platform, it will eliminate the task of duplicate data entry. Once both of your applications storing customer information are integrated, your staff will no longer have to input the same customer data into multiple applications. Not only does this streamline operational processes by removing a time-consuming task, but it increases the accuracy of customer information. Coconut Software’s appointment management platform allows your appointment analytics to directly sync to your CRM application so you can track metrics such as attempted and completed customer interactions with your business, and the customer information collected when the appointment was scheduled. The customer and company data is updated in real time, ensuring your advisors have the most recent customer data, allowing your organization to provide a premium customer experience and enhance operational efficiencies. 2. Enhance the Customer Experience Having your appointment management solution paired with your CRM application allows for all customer information to be stored in one place, enabling you to use multiple channels and streamline operational processes. Coconut Software’s appointment management platform allows you to capture and track information about the products your specific customers are using, and their previous behavior with your organization. With this information, you can tailor future interactions to meet their needs. For example, one of your customer-facing advisors checks the history of a customer with an upcoming appointment to discuss insurance plan options. While looking into their history, the advisor can see the customer has invested in a TFSA with your organization in the past. With this insight, the advisor prepares a pitch for another type of investment account to share with the customer during their appointment. This allows your organization to potentially up-sell customers and shows you are in tune with their needs and past behaviors. 3. Enhance Company Communication Another benefit of integrating your appointment management solution with your CRM application is that you can improve communication within your organization by having all of your employees working from the same platform. When a customer schedules an appointment through either your business’s online channel or contact center, the information collected at that time will also be visible in your CRM. This allows your customer-facing staff to have the necessary insight into
Customizable Software Solutions v.s. Generic Integrations
When searching for a new technology solution, it can be difficult to decide whether your business needs a cookie-cutter integration or the additional benefits that come with customizable software solutions. The first step is to evaluate the issues your organization is experiencing to better understand what kind of solution you need. After isolating and identifying the issues affecting your organization, you will be better able to assess the technology options available. Interested in learning more about how Coconut Software can help your organizations digital transformation? Download The Ultimate Guide to Digitally Transforming the Appointment Experience. With integrated appointment scheduling, there are a variety of solutions, at many different price points, which directly reflect the capabilities of the technology. While sometimes you only require a cookie-cutter integration, there are many benefits that come with a customizable, enterprise-grade scheduling software solutions. There are three things that you should look for when assessing a potential new technology implementation which includes the ability to custom brand, an open and flexible API, as well as avoiding partnering with a solution that has acquired tech debt. These features are worth considering as they will help the functionality of both your front-end customer experience as well as your back-end processes. Full Support for Custom Branding Being able to fully brand the user interface and customer experience of your technology solution allows your organization to offer your customers a familiar style and functionality through a third-party solution. Implementing customizable software solutions, such as online appointment scheduling can drastically improve customer experience, in line with your company’s branding and messaging. With a third-party solution that provides a customizable CSS, your organization will be able to keep a consistent customer-facing view to increase brand awareness and streamline the customer journey. Going with a solution that doesn’t enable custom branding leaves you open to the risk of inconsistent brand messaging and theming. This can be problematic as customers could disregard emails that are distributed through your third-party solution that do not fall in line with your brand look and feel. The inconsistency in branding can also cause customer journey abandonment with your organization if customers are taken to an application that does not follow the same branding themes as the rest of your organization’s customer-facing portals. Coconut Software’s customizable scheduling solution enables your organization to brand both the front and back-end of the scheduling solution. This ensures that both your customers and your staff will have a consistent experience with your brand. With custom branding, you can ensure the style and message of your communication is consistent throughout your customer’s journey with your organization. Flexible API The key advantage of choosing a solution that uses a powerful and open API is that is will greatly enhance your organization’s productivity. An open API allows businesses to integrate a new solution with any system, including a CRM and calendar applications. And, an open API eliminates duplicate data entry, allowing information to be stored in one place, resulting in more streamlined reporting and back-end processes. Providing an open, customizable API requires more support and configuration by the technology provider, which is why it is not offered by every vendor. The drawback to choosing an implementation without an open API is that you will not be able to configure your new solution to your other applications. This will prevent you from streamlining operational processes in your organization, such as integrating your CRM with your appointment scheduling application to ensure that all customer-facing staff are equipped with the right information to provide your customers with a premium experience. Additionally, working with an application that has a closed API prevents you from sharing data between different applications used in your organization, leading to inefficient back-end processes. The Coconut API is used to build custom client views and allows for integration with other solutions, including proprietary systems. Our open API allows for two-way calendar sync with Outlook, Google and Office 365. Our flexible integration also enables appointment data to flow into Leads, Contacts, Activities, and Campaigns in Salesforce, and full support for mapping custom questions from forms to custom fields in the SFDC application. Here are some of the other applications we currently integrate with No Tech Debt Selecting a third-party solution that has accumulated tech debt will directly impact how the application functions once it has been integrated into your organization. What is tech debt? Technology takes on tech debt when a business writes new code on top of the outdated code, instead of eliminating it entirely. This leaves room for bugs and other errors to emerge down the road. It takes a lot of time and resources to manage the accumulation of tech debt within an organization. Choosing a premium, customizable solution puts you at less of a risk of partnering with a provider that has acquired a significant amount of tech debt, allowing your implementation to function as seamlessly as possible. If you implement a solution that comes with accumulated tech debt, you’ll end up with a buggy implementation. Your new technology could end up being more of an issue than a solution! At Coconut, we understand the pain that comes with implementing a solution, only to find out it’s not able to provide full functionality due to tech debt. We have a team dedicated to addressing tech debt, and ensure our customers enjoy all the benefits of a premium appointment scheduling solution. How Coconut’s Premium Solution Allows You to Control the Full Appointment Lifecycle Many calendaring applications allow your customers to schedule appointments, however, not many allow for full control and view over the appointment lifecycle. With Coconut Software, you can collect additional information at the start of the appointment journey. This enables your customer-facing staff to better meet the needs of your clients when they come in for their appointment thanks to additional insight into the customer’s history with your organization and their current needs. We offer the ability to add touch-points to your customer’s journey with appointment confirmation, reminders, and follow-up
5 Digital Trends Shaping the Future of Banking and Credit Unions (2019 Update)
The top digital initiatives in 2018 that are informing the future of the banking industry and how these trends are affecting organizations like yours.
4 Contact Center Customer Service Issues And How to Solve Them
Highlighting 4 Contact Center customer service issues that are costing your financial organization money, and how we recommend resolving the root of each problem.
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.
Mastering Social Customer Acquisition For Banks and Credit Unions
Optimize your social content to attract new customers and engage existing ones by integrating online appointment scheduling with your social media strategy.
The 4 Best Follow-Ups to Decrease No-Show Meetings
Learn about the best methodolgy appointment driven organizations can use to decrease no-show meetings with Coconut Software.