There are no doubts that the face of business has changed even more so following the COVID-19 pandemic which has pushed and even forced more businesses into adopting some form of digital changes particularly in the financial services industry. The main focus across the industry has been on quick and efficient implementations that help to keep the business steady and to connect both its people and processes.
One of the core elements that requires significant investment in order to achieve this is agent enablement through the use of a combination of the Microsoft Dynamics stack & the Microsoft Power Platform.
Agent Enablement: building and growing customer engagement in the financial services industry.
Having this sort of capability isn't a new concept in the sector. Many retail banks have been at the forefront of the early adoption of omnichannel agent enablement as a way to help them stand out from a customer service point of view. With this concept successful in practice, business banking, insurers as well as investment banks are quickly understanding the associated benefits of connecting both communications and unified data infrastructures.
What are some of the main features of enabling, connected agents in Financial Services?
Head to the places where customers are: social agents
A higher proportion of insurers and FinTechs are turning to in-app communications via private social channels like WhatsApp in addition to the existing ways that they communicate through public social media channels. Through the use of Microsoft Cognitive Services allows your agents to regularly review sentiment towards certain financial products, service levels as well as brand to put them in the best possible position to respond in a timely manner to avoid negative sentiment becoming more of a problem for the business.
One customer view: all seeing agents
Through the use of enabled agents, your business is able to provide a good service to customers and work towards becoming more of a people-centric business. Having access to unified real time data can help to unlock valuable insights to help you work towards heavily personalised customer experiences. Bring together rich data across all of your channels to get a complete 360-degree view of your customers. From this, you will be able to accurately predict future customer requirements and behaviours based on historical data, channel preferences, renewal dates to allow your business to maximise the value of that customer. Augment the system to meet your requirements through the use of Power Automate and gain rich reporting through the use of Power BI.
Educate and inform your customers: empowered agents thus empowering customers
Being able to access all kinds of financial product and service information, aligned with AI insights, sentiment analysis and next best action guidance will help to both educate as well as inform your customer base. Through the use of the enabled agents, they will have ability to give customers the financial information they seek, when they require it and from whichever channel they want to receive it on. Some of the benefits gleaned from having such information at your fingertips are financial literacy and inclusion. It goes without saying but customers are empowered by the ability to research or self-serve the content they need, 24/7 and with it make informed decisions based on accurate financial data. Therefore, this will enable the business to setup a sales pipeline even before the customer has reached out.
Demonstrating the human side: live agents
In the past, having frontline customer contact through live service agents was very much unheard of in the financial services industry. However, the growing use of automation and unified data centres has enabled employees to better manage their day-to-day tasks and thus allowing them to focus the rest of their efforts on engaging with customers. Whether this be in the form of responding to any problems or issues or helping customers to make difficult financial decisions, live agents can help guide prospects through a sale, connect customers up with compliance automations, guide them towards the self-service part of the business in Power Apps Portals or even provide a digitalised document for them to sign.
Next Steps?
If you are a business that is operating within the financial services industry and are looking to revolutionise the way that you engage with your customers through the use of Microsoft Dynamics and the game changing Microsoft Power Platform then please give our team of experts a call today to discuss your specific requirements.
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