Customer-centric Engagement in the Financial Services Sector: A Case Study

As global economies hum at varying speeds and geographical boundaries continue to dissolve with hundreds of financial institutions going international each year, the need to provide and deliver premium quality customer service has become paramount. This case study examines how live chat software can go a long way in further strengthening an already existing customer service model and attempts to demonstrate that live support can indeed be viewed as a cost effective vehicle for both customer acquisition and customer retention.

Live Chat and the Dynamics of Financial Service Delivery
As an individual and the owner of an online enterprise, you have often felt the need to interact with banks, credit unions, S&Ls when they were around, insurance companies, and perhaps one or two mortgage companies on the way. Let us turn the table 360 degrees for a few seconds. As a member and probably a decision maker in this industry, you have most certainly felt the need to interact with both prospects and existing customers by deploying multiple customer communication channels. These may include the traditional telephone-based customer service, e-mail, text messaging and web communication through website contact forms. IN-person and over-the-counter communication in which customers visit your branch, continues to remain ever popular. Live chat does not have to be a missing element in this equation because it is already a known part of this mix and is highly effective according to a number of surveys and research studies published over the years.

Real Life Evidence in Real Time in Support of Live Chat
Isabel Wilson is the owner of a dollar store in suburban Rockville Maryland. After being told by one of her customers, a CPA, that she is paying a hefty monthly service charge for her business checking account at her local bank, she decided to go bank shopping on the Internet. By using the power of geo targeting and local search, she was able to identify four banks and one credit union located within walking distance of the strip where her dollar store was located. Her decision to visit these branches during her lunch hour had to be shelved owing to employee turn over and high rates of attrition. Her only choice was to go online and visit the websites of each of these financial institutions. Calling the customer service of each bank, one bank at a time, would prove detrimental since she was the only one to manage the checkout line. When she noticed a live chat button on the website of the second bank, she jumped at the opportunity and before she knew it, she had signed up online as a new customer. She used live chat to ask questions such as minimum balance rules, overdraft charges and new check fees. She received clear instructions via the chat transcript, which she was able to save on her PC, regarding how and where to fax the relevant documents.

Live Support Software on your Website
This hypothetical example, when placed in perspective, goes to show that customers can have genuinely valid reasons to prefer live chat over the telephone, a personal visit or e-mail communication. These reasons may include:

If you are a member of the financial services industry and are looking to further enhance the quality of your customer service model, live chat might just be a worthwhile adjunct to consider because of its extreme ease of installation, more than 99% reliability through consistent uptime, and the minimal expense involved in deploying live chat software on your financial institution’s website.