NovelVox digitizes and personalized customer experience for American National Bank

Customer experience has overtaken price and product as the key brand differentiator. Regardless of which industry vertical you are dealing in or business size, a better customer experience can boost customer retention and significantly improve brand loyalty.

Here, Amit Gandhi, founder, NovelVox, tells us about how they tackled a problem faced by the American National Bank. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: Please tell us about the business challenges faced by American National Bank?

Amit Gandhi : Over the years, banks and financial institutions have faced several challenges like limited communication channels, long waiting times, lower resolution rates, and constantly toggling screens and scroll apps.

Subsequently, this affects the overall customer experience and leads to customer churn. Being one of the largest banks in the United States of America, it was no surprise that the bank has a vast customer base, which later became the roadblock to delivering a superior CX.

DQ: How did they choose Novelvox, and how does NovelVox identify the requirements?

Amit Gandhi: They found the NovelVox product as a suitable solution for their ongoing problems. NovelVox, a leading contact center solution provider helped American National Bank drastically improve the banking experience for its customers by leveraging next-gen contact center integrations. The unification of all customer information powered by NovelVox solutions drastically reduced the call handling time, personalized customer experience to improve CSAT scores, and improved agents’ productivity by simplifying workflows.

DQ: What was the process and timeline?

Amit Gandhi: The process was in two phases. 

Phase I – Initial PhaseIn this phase, when the client approaches NovelVox with their specific requirements, NovelVox’s team assists the client in outlining the project requirements through various meetings and video call sessions.

Phase II – Middle PhaseThe solution development task is strictly assisted as per the client's requirements and problems. NovelVox, through its products, strives to provide robust solutions that boost productivity and save time.

More often than not, when a customer calls a bank's customer care number, the agent has to validate and sometimes share relevant information with the customer. This information is usually stored at numerous places such as backend systems, third-party applications, etc. Having such disparate systems in operations forces the agents to switch multiple screens and sometimes even systems during the live call, which increases the call handling time and causes an unpleasant experience for the customers.

Knowing only integration can help curb this challenge, NovelVox offered the bank an integrated and banking-vertical optimized unified agent desktop application. The solution unified the data spread across databases, backend systems, and core banking applications and empowered the agents with a workspace offering a 360-degree view of customer information over a single screen. The single pane of glass view drastically improved the agent and customer experience. With almost zero screen switches and minimal effortsto access data, agents could address queries more efficiently - about 1.5 times faster than before.

To personalize CX, NovelVox ensured the agents were well aware and prepared for an inquiry beforehand. As soon as a call landed on their desktop, agents were equipped with complete customer information, including contact details, past interaction history, and more. It enabled agents to greet the customers with their first names, resulting in customer delight brought about by personalization. Better experiences helped the bank win customer's trust and loyalty while saving operational costs.

DQ: How has the project helped the business? Has that also led to you identifying some additional opportunities to pursue?

Amit Gandhi: Besides improving agent experience and productivity, NovelVox also helped American National Bank improve customer experience by personalizing services based on the customer journey. Better experiences helped the bank win customer's trust and loyalty, while saving operational costs. Moreover, it helps the bank improve its Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score.

DQ: Did the bank undergo any skill mix and culture?

Amit Gandhi: Yes, the bank undergoes the team's skill mix and culture to need more clarity on the solutions NovelVox has provided to them. It was essential for us to understand the bank's support team's core challenges to offer surefire solutions. For this, NovelVox's team connected with the concerned persons to get the snippets of the bank's call center service.

 

It was found that American National Bank was facing huge traffic in terms of customer queries daily. While talking to a customer on call, the agents had to open multiple applications on their systems to fetch and share relevant information. This was extending the average call handling time, due to which more and more customers were forced to wait in queues for longer times. As a result, the bank could not manage such queries efficiently, and hence, customer experience was being impacted.