Staffing and forecasting gaps hurting CX? Get the Branch Workforce Playbook.

ACCESS NOW
Coconut Software Logo

Tag: Technology Implementation

Benchmarking Your New Technology Implementation

Coconut Software - Blog Hero - Benchmarking Technology Integration

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.

Investing in New Technology Training

Coconut Software - Blog Hero - 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

Assembling Your Software Implementation Team

Coconut Software - Blog Hero - Implementation Team

In order to streamline the implementation process of your new technology solution, it is important that, (along with support from the decision makers in your organization) you gain inter-departmental support, essentially building an implementation team to speed up the process. Failing to establish your software implementation team can be very problematic when the times comes to roll-out your new solution. Not gathering input from various departments within your organization could lead you to choose a solution that is not viable for many other teams within your organization and that is missing elements necessary to meet the needs of other problem areas. Ultimately, this can cause roadblocks later on in your roll-out process. Here are some of the was in which your software implementation team can make the roll-out of your new solution that much easier. Is the Software Solution Viable? Gathering representatives from various departments early on in the process will help you choose the best solution for the issues your organization is experiencing. Assembling a software implementation team made up of individuals from various departments will ensure it is a viable solution for the departments that will use and benefit from it. And, with their early support, they will help clear the path for a smooth roll-out of your solution. Meet Everyones Needs By establishing the software implementation team early on, you will ensure the solution meets everyone’s needs. You will want to get the most out of your new software solution, and by learning what the needs are from the departments that will benefit from this solution, you will be able to get the best return on investment. Additionally, the department representatives on your software implementation team will become advocates for the new implementation. Members of different departments will be able to sell the solution to their team, encouraging employees to adapt to the new technology at a quicker rate. Prevent Roadblocks Your software implementation team will help smooth out the roll-out of your solution. You will also gain feedback from each department about how to best roll-out the solution to meet their needs, providing support for the logistics of the implementation. Establishing a software implementation team made up of members from various departments in your organization will help avoid roadblocks later in the process, as each department benefiting from the solution had an advocate of theirs involved from the beginning. This ensures your solution is realistic and beneficial. Who Should be on Your Software Implementation Team? Most organizations, when rolling-out new tech solutions, develop teams that include members of the Marketing and IT teams, representation from other business units, and a project manager to lead the process. Each representative plays an important role in the implementation process and will help ensure your new solution will meet the needs of every benefiting department. Project Manager A project manager is a key member of the software implementation team. Their main responsibility is ensuring the roll-out of your new solution is seamless and efficient. The main role of the project manager is to conduct day-to-day correspondence with your software solution provider and manage the other members of the software implementation team. This job is critical, as it ensures the roll-out process accommodates all the benefiting departments in your organization, and that other members of the software implementation team complete the necessary tasks to ensure a seamless roll-out. IT As this is a technology implementation, it is crucial that you involve your IT team early on. They will be able to give insight into what is possible in terms of a technology integration within your organization. Additionally, they can give insight into any adjustments needed to make this a high functioning, compatible solution within your organization. Your IT team also knows your back-end processes better than we do, making them a crucial component in ensuring you have a seamless installation and configuration of your new solution. These team members will be most interested in understanding more about our open API, and how the solution can be customized to meet the needs of the organization. Marketing Implementing a new customer-facing solution needs to involve the marketing team. They will be crucial for raising awareness about your new solution, and ensuring the implementation is customer-ready with familiar branding and accessibility requirements. The marketing team is the most familiar with your organization’s customer-experience expectations. They’ll be most interested in determining how the appointment scheduling software can be custom-branded to fall in line with their branding guidelines and provide their customers with a seamless and consistent journey. Business Units Aside from Marketing and IT, there are many other departments within an organization that could benefit from your new solution. Be thorough, and add representatives from each department to your software implementation team. These members will be able to advocate for the needs of their departments and give insight into what the solution should offer to improve operational efficiencies within the organization. This also benefits the project manager, as they will be able to delegate tasks to each department representative, making the roll-out process that much quicker. By establishing your software implementation team, and composing it of members from various departments within your organization, you will be able to see the bigger picture of what your solution will have to accomplish. This will allow you to make sure the solution benefits as many aspects of your business as possible, giving you the highest possible return on investment. With Coconut, one customer success coach along with a project manager is dedicated to your implementation process to ensure you have a positive experience with us, as well as a seamless roll-out of your new scheduling solution. For more information about who you should include on your software implementation team to experience a seamless roll-out of your appointment scheduling solution, book a consultation today! 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.

Customizable Software Solutions v.s. Generic Integrations

Coconut Software - Blog Hero - Customizable Software Solutions

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

The Importance of Securing Early Buy-In from Decision Makers

Coconut Software - Blog Hero - Importance of Early Buy-In

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

3 Reasons to Digitally Transform Your Contact Centers

Coconut Software - Blog Hero - Digitally Transform 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

What is Stalling the Digital Transformation for Your Bank?

Coconut Software - Blog Hero - Stalled Digital Transformation in Your Bank

There is a major digital transformation occurring in the financial services industry and some organizations are moving faster than others. Has your organization found itself falling behind in the banking technology rush? In this post, we’ll explore some of the reasons why some banks, credit unions, and other financial services institutions have found it challenging to keep up with digital trends, and what to do to overcome these roadblocks. 3 Major Obstacles Blocking the Digital Transformation for Your Bank 1. Older back-end processes hinder IT innovation We’re moving towards the future of digital banking at a rapid rate. And given this pace, you’ve probably observed that your organization’s core technologies are struggling to support integrations with newer technologies that are available. To help overcome these challenge, you should seek out new systems that both enhance the operational processes in your organization and are compatible with your current core technologies. 2. Key talent gaps in the team The next common obstacle you may be experiencing has to do with your people. Again, given the pace of innovation and change due to new technologies in the workplace, your organization’s IT team may be struggling to support new technology implementations that are available.  If you don’t want your tech team to be taken away from the important day-to-day work that keeps your organization running in order to manage new implementations, you should seek out new technology that requires minimal in-house resources to implement. If this is not possible, you may want to consider bringing in senior IT talent who has experience with large-scale technology implementations and can help you navigate the pitfalls and obstacles. 3. Organizational resistance to changes that threaten the status quo Customers and staff can have a difficult time adjusting to rapid change. This is understandable, however, change is inevitable and is absolutely the way forward if your organization is going to keep up with digital transformation in the bank sector to stay competitive. That said, finding a tool that is intuitive and user-friendly is key to the success of your business and will allow ease of staff and customer adoption while improving the customer experience. Overcome Your Banks Stalled Digital Transformation with Appointment Management Solutions When looking at tech solutions that will enable your organization to offer a premium, digitized customer journey, online scheduling is just the implementation for the job. Enterprise appointment scheduling can help you overcome a number of obstacles traditionally associated with tech implementations and can be integrated into your current customer communication channels as well help you open up new, online channels. The benefit of a scheduling solution that integrates into different channels is that is can be rolled out in phases to ease both your staff and customers into your digital transformation. Call Center Integration By starting tech implementations through existing channels, such as your organization’s call center, your in-house IT resources will not be swamped by your new solution.  Additionally, organizational resistance will be low due to your new implementation enhancing a channel that both staff and customers are already familiar with. Online Integration The benefit of implementing an enterprise scheduling solution is that you can also offer new channels, that allow your customers the ability to book appointments in real time, 24/7.  This caters to one of the many ever-increasing customer expectations that your organization be accessible to them at all times. How Coconut Software Can Help Once you have decided that enterprise appointment scheduling is what your organization needs, where do you go from there? Simple implementation Choosing a tool that can be implemented in a matter of weeks with a dedicated support team is key, especially if your organization is at the beginning of its digital transformation, lacking up-to-date, back-end support. Coconut can be implemented within a matter of weeks and allows your organization to have a smooth implementation that is ready whenever you are. “Amazing support structure, quick turn around times, and always willing to work with us to provide out of the box solutions.” – Carly Lock, Rogers Full support team It can be a struggle to use a significant amount of in-house resources to implement a new solution in your organization. Looking for a tool that comes with an exceptional support team that will allow you to use a minimal amount of your own resources is beneficial.    Coconut provides you with a dedicated customer success coach as well as a project manager to support your financial organization to kick-start the digital transformation for your bank. “Our experience with Coconut has been excellent. Their team of dedicated professionals worked hard to accommodate our needs and we are very pleased with the end results.” – Nathan Heemskerk, Tandia Financial Credit Union Easy transition through channels Customers and employees can be adverse to change.  Implementation adoption is very valuable but hard to attain. Coconut can be integrated into existing channels, such as your organization’s call center, as well as new channels, such as your online platform, easing both your customers and staff into the digitization of the banking industry. Any transformation can be daunting, especially one that is shaking up an entire industry, however, change is inevitable and choosing an implementation that best supports your organization in this time of change is key.  Enterprise appointment scheduling is that tool that your financial organization has been looking for. Schedule a consultation today to experience the benefits of enterprise scheduling solution.  

5 Benefits of Digitizing Your Back-End Process

Coconut Software - Blog Hero - Digitizing the 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