It's a good time for businesses to take stock of their achievements and shortcomings over the past 12 months, and to make plans to increase the former and reduce the latter in 2015.

For those in banking and financial services, there's one theme that should be a top resolution for 2015: Improving the customer and member experience.

A study conducted earlier this year by J.D. Power illustrated the need for such improvements, noting that midsize banks in particular are notably lagging behind larger banks in customer satisfaction, and they were even found to be declining in points among affluent customers.

Can you guess what the number one complaint was among survey participants? It was not high fees or low interest rates that garnered the highest percentage of complaints; rather, it was poor customer service.

According to a recent survey from Avaya, financial services customers increasingly expect an omni-channel, personalized and proactive customer experience:

• 70% of customers expect financial services companies to link all threads of communication together, in real-time, across channels.
• 70% expect customer-facing staff to have a single view of channels in real-time when they contact the company.
• 92% expect to be proactively notified of any issues and offered solutions.
• 69% expect to be contacted the way they want, when they want, with products and services tailored to their preferences and buying habits.

Don't Ignore the Simple Self-Service Option Your Customers Really Want

Despite the majority of business managers acknowledging the importance of a customer experience management program, less than half have such a system in place.

Thankfully, the research also found an upside: Among financial services organizations that have a comprehensive customer experience management program, 98% have seen improvements to their business as a direct result.

Another positive point to consider is that attaining an omni-channel customer experience doesn't mean scrapping everything you're currently using and starting from scratch. In fact, if you hone in on two of the biggest complaints customers consistently mention in customer surveys — long hold times and having to repeat themselves to multiple customer service agents — there's one relatively simple improvement you can implement right away. The solution entails combining web chat and SMS and creating a text chat service that allows a customer to text an agent and receive a response back on their computer or smartphone.   

Why offer this service? According to a study conducted by The Harris Poll and commissioned by OneReach, among those who use text messaging, 64% (that number goes up to 76% for 18- to 34-year-olds) said they would prefer to carry out some kind of customer service activity via SMS.

Another interesting finding in the study was that companies that offered text messaging were likely to get a more positive response from customers, including:

• feeling the company understands their time is important,
• staying loyal to the company,
• recommending the company to others, and
• choosing the company over others that do not offer text messaging.

How would this work? In addition to your normal self-service options, you simply offer text chat or SMS chat through your mobile website, or even publish an app with texting options. To the agents, it looks like a simple chat session, and they have FAQs and common responses available at their fingertips. Add options for callback as well, and your customers will be much more likely to go to that mobile option, supported with live help if and when they need it.

The fact is that anything a company can do today using an IVR (i.e. the bane of many customers' existence) also can be done so much more efficiently through mobile navigation, with the potential to generate far better results.

Besides the fact that this solution saves the company the cost of a live agent call, it's clear that it's really what your customers want.

Are you ready to meet their demands in 2015?

John Cray is vice president of product management for Enghouse Interactive.  He can be reached at 630-544-8958 or [email protected].