Finance BPO: Why Outsourced Customer Care Is a Key Part of Cloud Financial Services

Thanks to accelerating industry competition, higher expectations from stakeholders, and a growing demand from customers for convenience and efficiency, the financial industry—like so many others—is now turning to on-demand contact center service providers to meet its customer care needs.

Of course, business process outsourcing (BPO) is already a well-known quantity in the world of finance. Yet the process of outsourcing contact center operations is starting to play a more prominent role within the larger realm of cloud-based financial services—such as the electronic ecosystem that includes other commonly business elements like administrative services and human resources increasingly delivered via the cloud.

On-demand customer care stands apart from other BPO finance elements, however, requiring not just a highly specialized and thoroughly secure technological infrastructure, but also the employment of uniquely experienced personnel. Included are contact center agents skilled in providing the kind of superior customer experience (CX) that transcends industry, but who also possess real financial expertise.

Related: The importance of offering a superior customer experience
For this reason, more and more financial institutions and organizations are partnering with on-demand customer care service partners that can demonstrate an established track record of achieving key CX metrics in addition to their existing suite of cloud financial services.

And when that customer care partner is in place, these businesses also are discovering that other advantages soon follow. They are benefits relating to data security, risk management, productivity, cost effectiveness, competitive advantage, analytical power and the capacity to improve results in the important area of customer satisfaction and loyalty, among quite a few others.

With that in mind, here’s a quick rundown of the advantages of integrating outsourced customer care into a company’s cloud financial services—and a few good reasons why your suite of BPO finance services isn’t complete without access to an on-demand contact center.

5 Benefits of Adding On-demand Customer Care to Your Suite of Cloud Financial Services

Benefit #1: Data Protection and Security. Not unlike the healthcare industry, financial institutions are subject to stringent security considerations and elaborate regulatory processes. That’s no surprise, given the sensitive nature of information involved, and the importance of ensuring that consumers enjoy the highest possible levels of protection.

On-demand contact center offers secured and protected services for financial institutions that customers and trust on.
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Beyond the need to meet all applicable regulatory mandates, keeping data safe and secure is also a huge driver in keeping your customers happy, satisfied, and confident that they can place their trust in you. Yet achieving those standards can be daunting task, requiring elaborate technological and operational elements including but not limited to:

• The investment required to continuously update hardware, software and other infrastructure to prevent hacking and security breaches.
• The implementation and maintenance of transmission and storage safeguards to protect personally identifiable consumer data.
• The creation of a comprehensive recovery plan to deal with security risks, manmade and otherwise—such as a regularly tested business continuity plan for natural disasters.
• The use of sophisticated access controls and authentication standards to validate all agents and employees who come into contact with customer data.

The onerous nature of these requirements, and the investment required to meet them on an in-house basis, is a primary reason why many businesses operating within the financial realm are choosing to outsource them to a dedicated customer care partner. Doing so helps ensure that the highest levels of data security are being met at all times—highly useful both for operational integrity and for attracting new customers (as well as satisfying existing ones).

Benefit #2: Risk Management. The data security that comes with entrusting your customer care services to a specialized, on-demand service provider also brings with it an advanced level of risk management, which can offer further benefits to larger operational model. For instance, fully securing your contact center means making your organization less of a target for hackers, which lessens risk on an organization-wide basis.

Entrusted and secured data platform is one of the benefits of partnering with on-demand contact center services.
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In essence, outsourcing your customer care delivery to a specialist is a security upgrade, which plays a big role in eliminating risk areas, such as security breaches and data hacking, that are very much top of mind for many customers. And that’s a big talking point when it comes to staying ahead of the competition, which brings us to…

Benefit #3: Market Differentiation. For many financial services providers, market differentiation is as important as it is difficult to achieve. By their very nature, many businesses operating in finance are somewhat limited in the extent to which they can offer customers a service model that truly stands apart. Even given a certain amount of differentiation in terms of geography or member demographics, the core products and services you deliver are often largely the same as that of your competitors.

Exceptional customer experiences can differentiate financial operations.
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Boosting the quality of your customer experience, then, can go a long way toward delivering this market differentiation, giving you a key advantage over other businesses. Partnering with a dedicated customer care provider means implementing methods proven to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty—an important step in avoiding being undercut by competitors, and in driving additional sales and growth.

Benefit #4: Customer Relationship Development. Partnering with an on-demand contact center service provider for your customer care needs also means getting access to experts who can craft an omnichannel communications strategy. As in so many other industries, this is essential not only in delivering a great CX but also in achieving a truly results-driven, customer-centric model.

By integrating all of your communications channels into a single strategy, you turn every interaction—whether via a phone call, an online inquiry, the use of an app or a social media follow—into an opportunity to better understand all of your clients and customer, and further develop your relationship with them. And this means giving your business more opportunities to satisfy them, as well as upsell and expand the services you offer to the people with whom you already do business.

Benefit #5: Data and Analytics. Today’s on-demand contact center services go far beyond basic customer interactions. When you integrate customer care into your BPO finance services you’ll get access to a sophisticated model of data gathering and analytical expertise that’s tailored to your specific niche in the financial industry, as well as to your unique business model and the specific customers you seek.

Having gathered sophisticated analytical information will help customer service expert provide a better experience.
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For instance, applying advanced analytical processes empowers customer care agents to provide a better experience by giving them instant, appropriate and high-level information about each customer and client they’re interacting with at any given time. That means they can shift to appropriate messages at a moment’s notice, and make smarter decisions at critical moments.

The use of data analytics is also key to understanding just who you’re reaching (and how, and when) so that you can better communicate to those customers, as well as find others who are likely to respond to your unique business model. It’s also useful in discovering who you’re not successfully reaching, so you can improve your efforts in connecting with them.

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Compelling as all these benefits are, they’re just the beginning: Partnering with an on-demand customer care provider also gives your organization greater productivity, adaptability, market agility, cost control—the list is almost limitless.

With more than 20 years of experience helping companies across a wide variety of industries achieve and surpass their customer service goals, Working Solutions is perfectly positioned to deliver the kind of customer experience that gets results.