3 Digital Banking Initiatives to Increase Branch Traffic

3 Digital Banking Initiatives to Increase Branch Traffic

A financial institution is like a machine — an exceedingly complex machine with very real money on the line. From your advisors to your backend operations, ensuring that all the parts of that machine work together seamlessly during the customer journey is the key to achieving peak operational efficiency. Below, we’ll discuss three digital banking initiatives to increase branch traffic that you can leverage in order to fine-tune operations and optimize scheduling in your organization, keeping things running smoothly at all stages, boosting the experience for both customers and staff, and driving more revenue to your organization.


increase branch traffic

1. Streamline the walk-in experience through digital banking initiatives.

Increasing in-branch traffic through a more efficient appointment booking process is of course desirable, however, managing that traffic is crucial to maintain customer retention and keep in-branch operations running smoothly. When customers arrive at the branch, staff require a method of determining not only how many customers are waiting, but what services they are looking for, which advisors they booked with, how long each of them can expect to wait, and many other important factors. Without a way for staff to access clear, readily available insights, back-ups can easily occur, creating frustration among both walk-in and appointment driven customers.

For both walk-in and scheduled appointments, a lobby management solution can help smooth out the in-branch experience. When staff have access to real time insights into queue length, wait times, customer handle times, and more, they are better able to optimize their time and allocate resources to increase operational efficiencies. At the same time, the solution can provide benefits to appointment driven customers by allowing them to check-in on arrival, prompting faster, more efficient service from their advisor.


contact center

2. Optimize scheduling to reduce customer effort.

As handling time in a contact center goes up, customer satisfaction goes down — it’s an obvious correlation, it’s one that stands repeating. The easiest way to create satisfied (and loyal) customers is by reducing the effort it takes for them to interact with your organization when booking an appointment. In fact, according to Gartner, 96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience. This boost to loyalty can lead to a big gain in revenue as well. As outlined in our recent webinar on the Customer Effort Score (CES) and its impact on the sales funnel, a bank with revenues of $1 billion can increase revenue by $852.4 million over three years, all by improving their CES just 10%. So taking care of any inefficient handling processes is a great first step to take in achieving those returns.

By implementing an integrated appointment management solution, you can streamline the appointment scheduling process within your contact center by taking advantage of real-time analytics to make informed decisions about staffing and workflow. With this in place, you can effectively remove the guesswork from the task of reducing call handle times, and in turn, increase the number of appointments driven to your branch locations, optimize employee schedules to improve their overall efficiency, and of course, reduce the level of effort that customers have to go through in order to complete their interaction. Taken together, the benefits of reducing handle time through an appointment management solution provides operations with the much sought after ability to increase branch traffic and customer loyalty, while simultaneously reducing staffing requirements.


customer-tracking

3. Track all customer-facing interactions in one platform.

When loyal customers contact your organization, they want to be recognized. In fact, 84% of customers say that being recognized as a person, not a number, is vital to winning their business. So by ensuring you have a solution in place to identify them at different touchpoints and recognize their tenure, you gain a key requirement to keeping their loyalty. Along with increased loyalty, this recognition lends to greater cohesion during customer interactions, creating a process that benefits staff by ensuring they are free from the task of collecting information that can now be automatically populated. With customers feeling valued, and staff better able to address them and their needs, these insights into your customers’ history is sure to affect operational efficiency in your organization, easily making it one of the most valuable digital banking initiatives or trends to consider implementing.

By scheduling customer interactions through the same platform regardless of channel provides staff with insight into the customer’s history and their needs, allowing staff to serve them more quickly and efficiently and providing them with the recognition they’re after. Additionally, since all customer-facing interactions are automatically managed through a single solution, all customer information can be centrally updated in real time, ensuring that staff always has the most up to date information at their disposal to provide the highest level of service.

Increase Branch Traffic With Coconut Software

When customers have a streamlined experience through whichever channel they choose to interact with your organization, you are setting your organization up for success. With Coconut Software’s integrated appointment management solution, there are multiple implementations available that can help enhance your operational efficiencies to minimize wait times for your customers, reduce customer churn and increase business in your branch locations.


What’s Next?

Looking for more strategies to meet your customers’ changing expectations around the in-branch experience? Download the full report Becoming Future Proof: Five Proven Strategies for the Branches of the Future to learn more methods in technology, design, and service that branches can take advantage of to adapt in the rapidly changing financial landscape.

Interested to hear what top experts in financial customer experience have to say about the coming challenges branches are looking forward to? Watch our panel discussion Embracing a Customer-First Mindset: Eliminate Friction Points in Your Customer Multi-Channel Journey.


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