Helping clients meet evolving customer demands
Lenders servicing customers across Recovery Loan Scheme, CBILS and BBLS will need to adapt to the unknown. Strategically re-evaluating contact approaches will be as important as adjusting tactics across channels, times, comms styles and scaling operations to meet customer needs. Firstsource is an outsourcing partner with years of experience. The success stories below exemplify services and solutions we’ve delivered to help our clients stay nimble.
An agile solution
Reacting fast to meet varied servicing demands
A challenger retail bank was expecting a very rapid surge in call volumes across a range of services. To meet this demand the client asked Firstsource to quickly roll out support covering
- Telephone banking
- Business banking
- Fraud detection
- Social media interactions
- Vulnerable customer support
Firstsource managed the complex operation across five sites with a joint client project team. To meet the predicted surge, we scaled customer support by recruiting 300 additional colleagues in a matter of weeks. As the magnitude of the surge became clear and Firstsource gained insights into the types of incoming enquiries, we recruited and trained further 450 colleagues in coming months.
Firstsource helped the client meet demanding timelines and scale operations while maintaining full standards for colleague recruitment, vetting and training. The outcomes include:
- 750-strong customer services team recruited and trained in 12 weeks
- 20% reduction in average handling times
- Over 95% Quality Audit performance across all lines of business
A flexible strategy
Improving engagement by aligning customer experience to brand values
Customer experience should embody an organisation’s brand values. For lenders, balancing relationships and collections, empathy and assertiveness, services and costs lies in staying true to the brand. The below example illustrates how we’ve helped a global client drive growth by aligning services to the brand promise.
This media and global magazine brand had ambitious goals to grow its subscriber base, yet high attrition was making this impossible. They approached Firstsource for help to improve retention and drive new subscriptions.
Firstsource conducted an advisory project with the client’s leadership team. We identified that the client’s brand was not reflected in customer services which were very transactional. The speedy interactions missed opportunities to build relationships through personal customer service. Firstsource created a customer experience strategy embodying client’s brand promise, vision, mission and customer needs. We defined six customer personas, each with a personalised support strategy and aided their rollout with a set of operational principles and day to day practices.
Firstsource helped to align the client’s brand to customer support models including:
- Persona-based selling and support
- Factoring emotion into customer contact to improve retention
- A new set of CX operational policies
- An omni-channel strategy projected to deflect 20% voice interactions to digital
Next steps
To learn more about how we can help customers in Financial Services visit our Banking and Financial services page. Or see how tech solutions such as automation can improve customer experience and support collections.
For more insights on servicing Recovery Loan Scheme, CBILS and BBLS accounts : Explore the Coronavirus Lenders Hub