Aspect customer contact solutions drive credit card customer experience

With competition to find, attract and keep long-term, profitable bank cardholders intensifying, lenders are becoming increasingly reliant on next-generation customer contact and workforce optimisation solutions to create and sustain differentiation through exceptional customer experience.

"Product improvement alone is not enough to drive long-term profitability for credit card lenders in an environment of radically changing, heightened customer service expectations," says Ebrahim Dinat, chief operations officer at specialist contact centre solutions and services provider, Ocular Technologies.

Dinat contends that today's demanding consumer is forcing credit card lenders to step back and re-examine the effectiveness of their entire customer experience programmes within both the contact centre and throughout the enterprise.

"Creating a differentiated customer experience is becoming more and more challenging, particularly when taking into account the fact that cardholders have a myriad bank, programme and service options available to them. As never before, the contact centre is poised to play an integral role in accelerating growth and profitability as organisations undertake customer experience makeovers."

The real challenge is to exceed elevated customer expectations. Dinat notes that, primarily because of recent technological advances, consumers have come to expect immediate and consistent answers and knowledgeable service providers, regardless of their channel of choice.

"Consumers also take for granted easy access to sophisticated self-help tools across the entire device spectrum, including computers, smartphones and tablets. The service challenges posed by this are internal barriers, such as disparate business systems, lack of 360-degree views of customer data and knowledge bases, untracked manual processes, little or no interaction between the front and back offices, and lenders dictating how and when cardholders can interact with their institution."

The Aspect next-generation customer contact solutions extend the reach of the contact centre, helping to ensure customer needs are met at an enterprise level while breaking down internal and external barriers that get in the way of customer contact excellence.

"Aspect operates with the Microsoft product stack. There is emphasis on Microsoft Lync, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM to integrate business systems, customer views, business processes, self-help applications and communications into a cohesive platform that lenders can use to exceed customer expectations," adds Dinat.

Integrating Microsoft Lync unified communications with an Aspect customer contact solution for interaction management, such as Aspect Unified IP, provides a holistic communications and collaboration environment. Through a single, intelligent routing engine, customers are empowered to communicate with the contact centre across self-service, e-mail, voice and instant messaging channels.

"The solution also offers 'Ask an Expert' functionality, tightly integrated with Aspect Unified IP, Microsoft Lync instant messaging and presence technology that enables the contact centre to efficiently find and access available enterprise experts. Through expert search capabilities, agents can connect with the right person with the right skills at the right time to resolve a challenging inquiry within a single interaction," concludes Dinat.