Tracking Appointment Analytics to Improve Customer Experience
Learn to use appointment and customer data to give your organization an edge over the competition. Track appointment analytics with Coconut Software.
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?
Strategies for the Impending Baby Boomer Crisis
Explore the boomer issues presented in a recent Financial Brand article, & how Coconut’s customer experience software fits into the marketing strategy.
Banking on Millennials
Learn how the growing generation of millennials is changing the world of finance in our latest infographic “Banking on Millennials.”
How Employees Improve Credit Union Performance
Read Eric’s take on Andy Jennings session at ICUL, and how the right tools & knowledge in the hands of your employees improve credit union performance.
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.
6 Simple Ways to Optimize Your Website Calls-To-Action to Increase Appointment Volume and Revenue
In our last blog, we discussed how to increase the probability of customers successfully booking an appointment with your organization, by reducing the number of steps it takes to complete a call-to-action. To drive even more revenue-generating appointments through calls-to-action on your website, your organization can use appointment booking software to eliminate friction, track and measure CTA conversion rate, and optimize CTA performance with A/B testing. In this blog, we’ll cover the ways in which you can further optimize your CTAs to increase appointment volume and revenue. Why CTAs Are Critical in Generating More Appointments and Revenue. Financial services organizations are typically appointment-driven, meaning that new business is generated through in-person interactions between an advisor and the customer. When in-person interactions carry such high value, it is crucial that your CTAs are engaging enough to convert digital customer engagement into an in-person interaction, in order to generate new business and increase revenue. 6 Variables to A/B Testing to Improve Your CTA’s There are many variables that go into creating an optimized CTA: where it is, what it looks like and what it says. All of these variables contribute to whether or not a customer engages with your CTA. Here are some of the different components of the CTA that you can optimize with A/B testing: Headlines and value propositions, to receive the most engagement Colors of CTA buttons Placement of the CTA – to the right, above the fold? Landing page layout #1 Focus on a primary CTA for the landing page. One way to optimize CTA performance is to have one goal for each page on your website, and tailor the accompanying CTA to one desired customer action. Providing more than one CTA on a given page can overwhelm the customer and reduce the probability that they will complete the desired action. Each page on your website should correspond to a specific CTA in order to streamline the experience for the customer and increase your conversion rate. #2 Review your page headline and value proposition to ensure that it resonates. Through A/B testing the headlines and value propositions on your landing pages, you will learn more about the individuals visiting your website, as well as what does and does not engage them. By better understanding your audiences’ preferences, you will be able to produce headlines that are relevant to your customers and increase the chances of landing page action completions. Here are some headlines and value propositions that may help increase customer engagement: Save for retirement Start saving for your child’s future interests and activities Stay on top of your spending #3 Use language that’s direct, persuasive and prompts your visitors to take action. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, the average attention span of a digital customer is 10 seconds per web page that they visit. If you want your customers to engage with you, you need to “talk” to them with clear and direct CTA messaging. You should use tangible and action-oriented language to provide your customers with clear direction about what they will get by clicking on the specific CTA. These are some common calls-to-action for banking and credit unions: Book an Appointment Open a Chequing Account Find a Branch or Location Pre-Qualify for a Mortgage #4 Test different visual formats. Another way to keep the journey simple for your customers is by using buttons for your CTAs instead of links. When your pages are full of text it can be easy to miss the CTA when it is embedded as a link in the text. By creating button CTAs, you are increasing visibility and the probability of customer engagement. #5 Optimize your landing page layout. One way to increase the engagement of your CTAs is through providing a very direct path to your customers. Your landing pages should include an organized visual hierarchy that will take your customers through a set of cohesive steps so that they are equipped with the information they need when they reach the CTA. One of the ways to foster engagement is through a page layout known as the Z-pattern, which follows the natural habits of a customer when they read your web-page. The design traces the route that the human eye travels when reading — left to right, top to bottom. If you follow this pattern when leading to your CTAs then you may have a higher chance of achieving your desired customer engagement. #6 Provide secondary calls-to-action throughout the customer journey, for those who aren’t ready to take that next step. Although you do not want the CTAs on your landing pages to be competing for the attention of the customer, it is beneficial to provide subtle secondary CTAs for individuals early on in the buying process, who require more information before they engage in your primary CTA. This could be incorporated deeper into your landing page and say something like “Want more information?” Streamline the customer appointment booking journey across all channels and increase appointment volume with Coconut Software. Coconut Software enables you to streamline the customer appointment booking journey–from clicking a ‘Book an Appointment” CTA, to improving the conversion rate in your appointment booking funnel. Implementing a self-serve booking channel helps you accept after-hours appointment demand that you may not be capturing today, which can increase appointment volume by 41%. A self-serve appointment channel also helps you decrease no-shows, with automated appointment confirmations and pre-appointment reminders. And, over time, improving the customer appointment booking experience can lead to higher appointment value. When customers start their journey with your financial institution with clear, accessible CTA language, an intuitive appointment booking flow and convenient reminders about when to arrive and what to bring for their appointment, the advisor is better set up to deliver a successful appointment. What’s Next? Ready to discover what areas of your customer journey are damaging your customer effort score? Schedule a customer effort assessment. Interested in learning how appointment scheduling can help your entire organization engage more efficiently and effectively with customers?
Measure Your Marketing Campaign Success
Learn how tracking your marketing campaign success is vital to improving conversions and ROI, and how Coconut Software can help.
Partnering With Vendors Providing Custom Branding
Have you ever visited a company website, clicked on a link from a call to action, and been redirected over to a web page that no longer looked or felt like the brand? If so, did you continue along the customer journey? Or did you bounce? Inconsistent branding can lead to brand confusion as well as a poor customer experience. Your organization’s branding is its public representation. Ensuring that your third-party partner can offer custom branding that matches your guidelines is crucial when you’re aiming to create a cohesive journey for your customers. Here are the benefits of partnering with a vendor that fully supports custom branding and the risks of choosing a solution that fails to do so. Create a Cohesive Customer Journey Customers expect to have pleasant, streamlined interactions with their service providers, and with the increased demand for efficient customer experience, it is imperative that your organization provides the high level of service customers are beginning to demand. Creating a cohesive journey for your customers includes keeping your company messaging and visual appearance consistent, no matter what steps they take through your customer-facing channels. The Importance of Custom Branding with Third-Party Tools When your organization builds the customer journey with touchpoints powered by third-party vendors it is crucial that those platforms can support your organization’s custom branding to keep the customer journey as consistent as possible. For example, let’s say you have implemented a scheduling solution into your organization’s online platform. When a customer clicks on ‘Schedule an Appointment’, it will take them off your website and into the third-party tool. If the branding on the page is not consistent with your company’s branding guidelines, the customer could abandon the process, thinking the site is not affiliated with your organization due to lack of branding consistency. This can lead to lost revenue due to your customer abandoning their appointment scheduling journey, and leaves you open to the risk of churn. Losing customers to something as simple as inconsistent branding is a scary thought, but it’s something that is easy to avoid. When the vendors you choose to partner with offer full support for custom branding, your customers will not be able to distinguish between your home platform and the third-party solution, providing them with an enhanced yet consistent experience. According to Capgemini, 91% of banks already want to collaborate with FinTechs to provide their customers with an enhanced experience. Why Brand Messaging and Tone is Important with Third-Party Tools Consistency in brand messaging is just as important as a consistent appearance for third-party solutions. For example, if your brand’s voice is friendly and whimsical, yet the tone used in the third-party solution is cold and stark, it can quickly change your customer’s attitude towards your organization, potentially causing them to abandon their journey and costing you business. Whether you are using a third-party vendor within your online platform or using it to communicate with customers through email or social media, it is crucial that you have the ability to provide consistent brand messaging to create a cohesive experience for your customers. Custom Branding ROI When you invest in a solution that fully supports custom branding your organization will experience a return on investment. The main benefits that come with custom branding are that it reduces churn by creating a cohesive experience for your customers, as well as helps acquire new business due to brand recognition. In fact, 77% of B2B marketing leaders state branding is critical to the growth of an organization. Recognition for Current Customers Marketing efforts are not just for acquiring new customers. They also help promote new services and products to your current customers. If you are using a third-party solution to communicate with customers via email or social media, consistent branding is crucial so customers recognize and acknowledge the information you are trying to communicate. If the branding of your customer messaging is off, it could cause customers to disregard your message entirely since they do not recognize who the content is coming from. Another scenario is that the customer does see the content, but is wary of the source due to the inconsistent branding and proceeds to ignore it. Brand Recognition and Customer Acquisition When an organization is recognizable due to their consistent branding, they are perceived as more dependable and reliable. According to BrandExtract, “A consistent brand helps increase the overall value of your company by reinforcing your position in the marketplace, attracting better-quality customers with higher retention rates and raising the perceived value of your products or services.” When partnering with a vendor that does not support full branding, you are placing your organization at risk of customers ignoring or not recognizing your communication efforts. This is problematic because if customers do not recognize your communication efforts they might feel as though your organization is dropping the ball in terms of providing a premium customer service. Additionally, this could result in a loss of potential revenue because your customers are missing out on communications regarding promotions or new service offerings. Experience Full Support for Custom Branding with Coconut Coconut Software’s enterprise appointment scheduling solution fully supports your organization’s branding, from the messaging style for email and SMS notifications, to the shape and color of the buttons in your scheduling solution. With our solution, customers can schedule appointments directly through your organization’s website. They’ll also receive confirmation messages after the appointment is scheduled and reminder notifications leading up to the appointment. With full support for custom branding, the look of the scheduling interface will match the rest of your company’s website, and the custom emails will follow your brand guidelines so that your customers recognize the consistent look and feel they are used to and know which organization is contacting them. 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.
Benchmarking Your New Technology Implementation
Going through a new technology implementation is no small feat. You want to ensure that, once complete, your new solution delivers measurable results against your organization’s KPIs by benchmarking your new technology implementation. One way to ensure you are getting the best ROI from your new appointment scheduling solution is by benchmarking your new technology implementation. This blog discusses the importance of setting benchmarks, and how you can use them to ensure you are getting the most out of your new appointment scheduling solution. The Risks of Not Tracking Your Benchmarks By not benchmarking your new technology implementation, you risk paying for an underperforming solution. With new technology, there is a high chance of a low adoption rate. However, if you do not know the analytics for the adoption rate of your new solution, there is no way for you to find and manage ways to increase its use within your organization. If this is the case, you will end up paying for a solution no one is using, and, ultimately, does not contribute to improving your operational efficiencies. Additionally, if your new solution is customer-facing and you are not collecting feedback on the experience it provides, you risk providing customers with a solution causing them undue frustration, instead of the positive impact you anticipated. Failing to collect feedback on your new solution will prevent you from gaining a better understanding of how your implementation fits into the customer journey. By failing to track benchmarks related to your new solution, you’re essentially stumbling around in the dark, having no idea how it’s performing. Different organizations have different use cases. Just because the technology was successfully implemented a certain way in one organization, does not mean it will work for you and your customers. Receiving feedback allows you to manage your new implementation to ensure it is functioning in the most beneficial way for your organization and its unique use case. The Importance Benchmarking Your New Technology Implementation Setting clearly defined goals for what your new solution should accomplish will provide you with a picture of what success looks like. This will also enable you to measure the success of your new implementation. By tracking the benchmarks for your new solution, you will be able to manage the adoption of the tool, see how it is increasing revenue, and what improvements it has made to the customer experience. Drive Customer Adoption Implementing a new solution with the potential to significantly improve operational efficiencies is great, but low customer adoption is one of the biggest barriers to success. With enterprise appointment scheduling, you will be able to track how many of your appointments are directed through which channels, and exactly where your customers are dropping off the line in the appointment booking journey. Understanding where friction points exist in the customer journey will help you figure out what needs tweaking to capture more appointments and increase adoption. Capturing analytics will allow your organization to see how well your customers have adopted your new solution. On average, Coconut Software customers have noticed an increase of 41% of appointments scheduled through their new, online portal. Increase Growth with Cross-Enterprise Visibility If you are an appointment-driven business, you rely on customers to schedule appointments with your organization to drive revenue. With enterprise appointment scheduling, you can accurately track the number of appointments scheduled, and see their status, whether completed, canceled or no-show. This will allow your organization to maintain cross-enterprise oversight of key appointment metrics that will impact revenue projections, workforce decisions, and other important strategic considerations. Coconut customers have experienced a 12.5% increase in the number of appointments being booked with their organization. By tracking the number of appointments booked, you will be able to see the increase in revenue that your new scheduling solution has contributed to your organization. Improve the Customer Experience If you are an appointment driven business, your operational processes will affect the quality of service you provide to your customers. With an appointment scheduling solution, you will be able to track the satisfaction of each customer regarding their experience with your organization. Since enterprise appointment scheduling is a customer-facing solution, you can receive direct feedback about the experience your new solution provides, and get feedback on what can be improved. Providing a personalized service is one way your organization can show your customers you value them, such as sending personalized reminders for upcoming appointments. Coconut customers have experienced a 23% decrease in no-show appointments through tracking their appointment analytics. This allows your organization to see how these personalized reminders perform, which directly affects the customer experience. How Coconut Helps You Manage Your Benchmarks At Coconut, our onboarding team is dedicated to providing our customers with a personalized implementation process to ensure you receive the most out of your scheduling solution. During the implementation process, our onboarding staff will discuss current challenges and overall goals with the stakeholders involved in the roll-out of your new solution to understand and help create your unique workflow. With the information about your unique use case and challenges you are hoping to address, we will help you set realistic benchmarks for your new solution. And, moving forward, our customer success team is available to help you track and manage your goals and metrics after you go live, through tutorials on how to use our platform reporting tool, and conducting bi-weekly meetings. By tracking the benchmarks of your new solution, you will give yourself peace of mind knowing you chose the best solution for your organization and that it is delivering business results against your KPIs. What Next? 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.
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
Investing in New Technology Training
Successfully implementing your digital transformation doesn’t end after launching new software/technology. Investing in new technology training is a key step in the implementation process to produce optimal results. Implementing new technology is great, but if you don’t know how to use it properly, you may be paying for features or functionality that aren’t delivering much value. Many organizations offer add-on training sessions to teach customers how to navigate all the features of their new implementation, which allow you to optimize the return on your investment. According to Middlesex University, 56% of HR Managers consider training and development to be an essential business enabler. Time is money, and one might think that training is a drain on time, that could be better spent working. However, the real cost that will negatively affect your organization comes into play if you’re not planning or executing your training programs correctly. Why Invest in New Technology Training? Choosing to invest in additional training sessions will allow your organization to get the most out of your new implementation. Ideally, you’ve chosen a solution that provides the most benefits to your organization. Getting trained on your new solution allows your staff to learn from the experts on how to utilize the new features and functionality, which means that you can expect the best return on your investment. No matter what solution you have chosen, it is going to have some impact on either your customer-facing channels and/or your back-end processes. Getting trained on your new implementation will enable your staff to use the new solution in the best way, in order to maximize operational processes. Although your vendor might have an amazing support team, it uses a lot of your organization’s time if your staff rely solely on customer support to manage your new implementation. The risk of relying on customer support from your technology vendor is that it can lead to inefficient operational process, waiting for the vendor’s support team to address basic questions about the solution that could be managed in-house if your staff receive the proper training. Additionally, investing in a training program for your new solution will greatly increase its adoption amongst your employees. When your staff are properly trained on how to manage your new technology solution, they will be much more likely to adopt it and benefit from the features it provides. allowing your organization to function at an optimal level. Avoid Poor Adoption and Frustrated Employees Your new implementation can become more of a detriment than a benefit if you choose to forgo a training program, ultimately blocking-up your operational processes. By opting to not go through a training program of your new implementation, you open yourself up to the risk of poor adoption by employees in your organization. If employees are not properly trained on how to effectively use the new software, there is little chance that your new implementation is going to have a high adoption rate. This is problematic as you will have different individuals within your organization using different applications and workflows, leading to disorganized back-end processes, which will inevitably lead to a poor customer experience. Not providing training for your employees can also increase turnover, especially if it is integrated into the regular tasks of their job. Not providing your employees with training on your new implementation that you are requiring them to use can cause frustration. This is due to the pressure being put on employees to use technology that they are not familiar with, resulting in blocked-up operational processes. Technology solutions are not cheap and typically involve a lot of effort from your organization to choose and subsequently implement. Spending the extra money on a training program for your new implementation is a worthwhile investment for your organization as it properly teaches employees how to successfully use the new solution and enhance operations processes. Why Invest in Coconut Software Training? At Coconut, our onboarding team is dedicated to providing our customers with a personalized implementation process, to ensure that you receive the most out of your scheduling solution. During the implementation process, our onboarding staff will conduct consultations with the stakeholders involved in the roll-out of your new solution, to understand and help create your unique workflow. Should you choose to take advantage of the training program for your new solution, our staff will use your use case as a base for putting together a customized training package. We have several learning materials available in terms of how your organization can go through the training process, all customizable to your organization’s use case and branding: Recorded, interactive webinars Modular tutorial videos Written user guides Recorded webinars This is a recorded, interactive training tool that includes a live tutorial on how to maneuver your new scheduling solution. Additionally, serving as a guide that you can refer to down the road. Modular Videos This training tool includes recorded videos on how to use the solution, tailored to your organization’s unique use case, and can be shared within your company, as well as uploaded to your organization’s LMS, or Learning Management System. User Guide User guides are written documentation that explains how to use your solution. We tailor the information in the user guide to fit your unique use case, as well as brand the document according to your organization’s guidelines. It is important that your employees get the training they require when first implementing new technology within your organization to streamline operational processes and foster high adoption. However, it is also crucial that you have the necessary resources available to onboard new employees an train them on your solution down the road. The amount of time and effort that goes into choosing and implementing new technology, it is in your best interest to empower yourself, as well as your employees, with the necessary training in order to get the most out of your new solution as well as improve operational efficiencies. What Next? Looking to boost revenue and deliver a premium experience to your
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
3 Reasons to Digitally Transform Your Contact Centers
In todays digital era, consumer needs have evolved. It’s no longer a matter of “if” banks will become fully digital, but “when.” The prospect of a digital transformation in the financial services industry does not necessarily mean the end of all traditional customer experience channels, like contact centers. In fact, using technology to improve the communications channels that are already in use and familiar to your customers is a great way to ease both your client base and your staff into the future of banking technology. As the first touchpoint for many appointment-driven businesses, 75% of organizations view the customer service provided in contact centers to be a key differentiator between competitors. Is your organization’s contact center providing your customer with a positive experience? Ready to learn more about upgrading your institution’s digital presence and capabilities? Download Coconut Software’s Ultimate Guide to Digitally Transforming the Appointment Experience. According to a study done by Cornell University, the financial services market tends to leverage larger contact center operations compared to other industries and is lagging behind in implementing contact center management software. While many banks and credit unions depend on contact centers as a channel for scheduling appointments with customers, many have little to no visibility into contact handling process efficiency. Unfortunately, this sluggishness to modernize the back-end is resulting in customers waiting, and waiting on the line as contact center agents try to assist them while navigating archaic processes on the other end of the line. As you look for ways to transform your contact center, it is important to highlight areas that could be made more efficient by implementing digital tools. For example, lengthy contact handle time, poor customer experience and high operational costs are all issues that likely plague your contact center and affect your organization as a whole. Enterprise appointment scheduling is one type of contact center technology that can help improve contact efficiencies, reduce operational costs and improve the customer experience. Here’s how. Digitally Transform Your Contact Centers With Appointment Scheduling Decrease Call Handle Time The number of calls that contact center representatives can accommodate in a day is a key success metric that impacts many other areas of the business. For appointment-driven financial services organizations, more completed phone calls equal more appointments and more revenue for your branch locations. And yet, 23% of companies still do not measure call handle time in their contact center. Long call handle times lead to long hold times for customers waiting in the queue, and 80% of customers drop off the line after being placed on hold for over 1 minute. One of the ways you can make significant inroads in increasing call handling efficiency is by implementing an enterprise appointment scheduling solution. Implementing a scheduling solution creates a more streamlined appointment scheduling process that allows your contact center representatives to accommodate more calls in a day. This can also contribute to improving the customer experience by reducing the amount of time customers have to spend on the line with your organization, just to schedule an in-person appointment. Additionally, by speeding up the appointment scheduling process you can schedule more appointments, driving more revenue to your organization’s branch locations. Improve Customer Experience 57% of companies can relate improving customer experience levels to revenue growth. For appointment-driven businesses, the contact center is the first point of contact between your organization and its customers, and so it absolutely must deliver a positive first impression. If you are an appointment-driven business and your contact center schedules the majority of your appointments, it is crucial that the customer information collected at the time that the appointment is scheduled is passed on to the advisor meeting with that customer. There is nothing more frustrating for a customer, that already had to go through the tumultuous process of scheduling an appointment, to show up to an advisor that has no insight into their needs. However, 54% of customer information collected at the time the appointment was scheduled is not relayed to the customer-facing advisor. An enterprise appointment scheduling solution can be integrated across all channels in your organization and allows for information that is collected from one customer-facing channel, to be stored on one platform that can be accessed by another customer-facing channel. This means that your organization can capture additional information at the time of the appointment scheduling by adding custom questions integrated into the scheduling process. The answers to these custom questions can then be accessed by the customer-facing advisor, enabling them to better prepare for their upcoming appointment with the particular customer and tailor the appointment to their needs. An additional benefit to implementing a scheduling solution into your organization’s contact center is that it allows you to add new touch-points to the customer journey that will reduce the appointment no-show rate, as well as make your customers feel valued. Your customers will be sent a confirmation email reminding them of the service, date and time of the appointment they just scheduled as well as any additional information they need in order to be prepared for their upcoming appointment. Additionally, SMS and email reminders can be sent out to customers reminding them of their upcoming appointment, reducing the chances of a no-show. Customers will appreciate these additional touch-points as we live in a busy world and it is easy to forget the commitments that they have made, and it makes them feel looked after and that their scheduled appointment is valued. By integrating your contact center channel into other customer-facing platforms in your company you can drive more revenue into the organization and provide customers with a premium experience. Decrease Workforce Costs Forrester recently reported that call volume is expected to increase over the next 12 months and 46% of global contact center decision makers project their contact centers to grow by 5% to 10% to accommodate the increase. Many organizations are pouring more of their resources into increasing rep headcount in their contact centers to manage the call volume, but this is
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
