Increase customer loyalty: Boost repeat business with omnichannel engagement
Discover how omnichannel customer engagement helps financial services firms create personalized customer experiences and exceed customer expectations to accelerate loyalty, growth, and profitability.
Why is customer loyalty important?
Customers are the lifeline of every business. They provide the revenue needed to maintain operations and help businesses grow by spreading word-of-mouth marketing about products and services. That’s why increasing customer loyalty should be a priority.
Creating loyal customers—those who have an affinity for a particular brand or company—can encourage repeat business, increase sales, and improve marketing efficiency. Plus, it provides a safety net for businesses during tough economic times since loyal customers tend to stick resolutely to their preferred products, brands, or service providers.
This commitment often outweighs other considerations such as purchasing convenience and pricing. For example, a loyal customer will embrace more products and services from their preferred brand, even if it means paying more money to ensure they’re doing business with a company they trust.
What is omnichannel customer engagement?
Omnichannel customer engagement is a strategic approach to marketing and customer service that enables a company to interact with customers on a one-to-one basis across multiple channels, including in-branch, online, phone, email, chat, and social media.
By delivering a consistent and seamless experience across all channels, financial services organizations can better meet customer needs and exceed their expectations. In turn, these activities can increase customer loyalty and drive more sales.
Increasing customer loyalty with an efficient omnichannel presence
One of the advantages of omnichannel customer engagement is that it allows businesses to collect data from every touchpoint and use that data to provide a more personalized customer experience.
As a result, omnichannel engagement helps businesses:
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Improve customer satisfaction:
Customers enjoy a seamless experience across all touchpoints of the customer journey and can conveniently engage with businesses on their preferred channel and schedule.
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Increase brand loyalty:
Personalized customer experiences, tailored services, and customer satisfaction lead to increased brand loyalty.
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Boost efficiency:
By incorporating multiple channels in their engagement strategy, businesses become more efficient in their operations and reduce costs related to customer service and support. Certain processes—like account management and payment processing—can be automated to further improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.
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Enhanced visibility:
With access to a variety of engagement channels and data insights, businesses can create visibility for their products and services among a wider audience, leading to more sales opportunities.
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Expand customer reach:
Omnichannel engagement enables businesses to target potential customers across multiple channels and devices, enabling them to reach customers anywhere and at any time.
In addition to these benefits, omnichannel customer engagement provides businesses with valuable insights into customer behaviors, which helps them make more informed business decisions, bolster engagement efforts, and further increase customer loyalty.
Typical customer pain points and how to address them
Customer pain points are the problems, frustrations, and challenges that customers experience when attempting to engage with a business to accomplish a goal or resolve an issue. Omnichannel customer engagement plays a pivotal role in helping financial services providers recognize and address these pain points.
The most common customer pain points can be sorted into the following categories:
- Process
- Financial
- Support
- Productivity
Process pain points:
When businesses struggle to connect customers with the appropriate person or department, for example, or when requests take too long to resolve, customer satisfaction can take a hit. These types of pain points can be reduced or avoided with omnichannel customer engagement applications that give agents access to the right information at the right time and use AI-driven productivity tools to help them close cases faster.
Financial pain points:
Financial pain points include things like high interest rates and hidden fees. However, financial services firms can alleviate these pain points by demonstrating transparency in their offers and providing a range of product or service options. This can be achieved through omnichannel optimization, which uses customer data to deliver relevant offers and tailored customer experiences.
Support pain points:
Customer support is an essential component of any successful business. Customers want prompt and knowledgeable answers to their questions as well as the convenience of engaging with the business on their preferred channel. Call center automation and omnichannel engagement solutions—like live chat tools and bot technology—aid businesses in promptly meeting customer expectations and increasing customer loyalty.
Productivity pain points:
Today’s consumers are seeking faster and more efficient ways to communicate with businesses. Examples of productivity pain points include friction or redundancy during the onboarding process and experiencing inconvenience or frustration when using the product or service. End-to-end cloud platforms that are designed to streamline customer processes—such as loan or policy applications—and increase customer loyalty help combat productivity pain points.
What do call center automation and bot technology do for customer engagement and loyalty?
To increase customer loyalty, it’s important to make interacting with your financial institution as easy as possible for the customer. After all, when customers get the help they need quickly and easily, they'll be more satisfied with their experience and, consequently, more likely to return in the future. Call center automation and bot technology can both be used as part of an omnichannel engagement strategy to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Call center automation delivers a consistent customer service experience. For instance, automated systems connect the customers with the right department and help agents provide faster, more accurate responses to inquiries—ensuring that customers always receive the best possible service. Additionally, call center automation enables businesses to collect data from customer interactions, which can be used to improve future customer service experiences and, ultimately, increase customer loyalty.
Similarly, bot technology—also called automated chatbots—provides customers with a convenient way to resolve issues by handling simple inquiries and tasks 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This frees up customer service representatives to handle more complex issues. Chatbots can also learn from customer interactions to improve their responses over time, which creates a better overall customer experience and increases the likelihood of repeat business.
Some of the key benefits of call center automation and bot technology include:
- Increased efficiency: Automated systems can handle more customer queries at a faster rate than human agents, so customers are less likely to experience long wait times.
- Improved accuracy: Automation allows for more efficient and accurate data collection and reduces the chances of human error and miscommunications.
- Reduced costs: Fewer resources are required when call center automation and bot technology are used as part of a customer engagement strategy.
Get started creating an omnichannel engagement strategy
If you’re thinking about implementing an omnichannel customer engagement strategy in your financial services firm, consider these tips for getting started:
- Get to know your customers and their needs. It’s important to understand which channels your customers are already using to communicate with your firm, as well as their preferred methods of communication.
- Identify the areas of your business that would benefit most. Learn where customers might be experiencing problems, frustrations, or negative interactions with your firm.
- Explore end-to-end solutions. Compare cloud technologies that are designed specifically for omnichannel customer engagement and delivering personalized banking experiences.
- Create a plan for how you will implement your strategy. In addition to which software and channels you’ll use—for example, call center automation or bot technology—this plan should include your goals, objectives, and timelines.
- Train your employees. Make sure your team knows how to use the new channels and tools that will be used as part of your omnichannel engagement strategy.
- Monitor customer interactions across all channels. Optimize engagement by analyzing data and identifying patterns in customer behavior and preferences.
- Track progress and make adjustments as needed. Your goal should be to continually improve the customer experience and increase customer loyalty, so it’s important to track what’s working and what’s not, then adjust your strategy accordingly.
Explore valuable resources for financial services organizations
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Reimagine the Customer Experience
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Frequently asked questions
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Customer loyalty is generally defined as a strong emotional connection that customers feel towards a brand or company. This connection is usually based on the customer's positive experiences with the brand and their satisfaction with the products or services offered. Increasing customer loyalty is important for financial services providers since it often leads to repeat purchases and referrals.
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Omnichannel customer engagement is a strategic approach to marketing and customer service that enables a company to interact with customers on a one-to-one basis across all channels, including in-branch, online, phone, email, chat, and social media. By delivering a consistent customer experience across all channels, financial institutions can create more loyal customers and boost sales.
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Using omnichannel customer engagement provides banks and financial services firms with valuable insights into customer behaviors, which helps them deliver personalized customer experiences, make more informed business decisions, and bolster engagement efforts. Together, these outcomes improve customer satisfaction and increase customer loyalty.
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Customer pain points are the problems, frustrations, and challenges that customers experience when attempting to engage with a business to accomplish a goal or resolve an issue. Omnichannel customer engagement plays a pivotal role in helping financial services providers recognize and address these pain points.
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Call center automation and bot technology can both be used as part of an omnichannel engagement strategy to improve customer engagement and loyalty. Call center automation uses technology to empower customers by routing them to the appropriate representative or providing them with self-service options. Bot technology refers to the use of chatbots or other automated agents to help customers with a variety of tasks, such as handling account inquiries—such as checking balances—or providing product information.
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Implementing an omnichannel customer engagement strategy in your financial services firm requires:
- Getting to know your customers and their needs.
- Identifying the areas of your business that would benefit most.
- Exploring technology solutions.
- Creating a plan for implementing your strategy.
- Training your employees to use the technology and tools.
- Monitoring customer interactions and collecting data.
- Tracking progress and making adjustments as needed.
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