For those not too familiar with the challenges of addressing telephone support to high-wealth individuals let me first describe the problem – and then how the Cloud is being used to address this with outstanding results.
Wealth management organisations have always struggled with the best way to provide telephone support to its high-wealth or important business customers. In an ideal world, the customer would be given a direct telephone number where he could reach his Relationship Manager (RM) on a 7/24 basis but in practice this level of contactability isn’t realistic. For much of the day, the RM will be in meetings with other important clients, or in many cases out on the road visiting the homes or offices of their clients. And so when a client has an urgent banking request and needs to speak to their RM in person, the chances are that at any given time the RM will be unavailable to take the call – much to the detriment of customer service.
So the Wealth Management institutions have an interesting challenge in how to ensure that their RM’s are there to always take the clients call with the need for them also to be spend much of the time away in private meetings with other high-wealth customers.
In the past, banks addressed this challenge in a number of ways. Some would give out the desk, mobile and even home-phone of the RM and invite clients to call them at any of these numbers. Of course, should the RM be genuinely unavailable then this only provided more numbers for the client to call, more places in which to leave a voicemail and generally more dissatisfaction.
Other banks would provide the name and number of an assistant who could take a message to pass along to the RM but who wouldn’t be able to address the clients needs directly. Again, possibly a better solution than leaving a voicemail - but still not very satisfying for the client who might need his request actioned immediately.
Some of the more insightful banks have taken a ‘team approach’ to solving this problem whereby the RM’s are grouped into small teams and while each RM has an individual responsibility for their personal clients they also have a collective responsibility for clients of their team members. Regular team briefings ensure that the RM’s are updated on any important issues concerning the clients they are collectively responsible for, so that if a client does call and is unable to reach their personal RM they will at least be able to talk with a banker who is familiar with their account and who can discuss this, or action any requests the client may have.
While this team approach is the most pragmatic at balancing the need to personally attend to the needs of important clients with the fact that the RM’s will often be unavailable it does pose a number of technology challenges to achieve. These include;
- The need to provide a single number that the client can call which will ring the desk, mobile and possibly home-phone of the RM so that the client doesn’t have to ring around these numbers themselves.
- The ability to create and easily maintain the ‘virtual teams’ made up of members who are changing frequently, often spread across offices or floors in a building and who themselves may be out on the road or meeting with clients themselves.
- The ability to overflow calls made to the RM to their support ‘team’ who themselves may have other delegation or overflow setting for handling their personal calls.
- The ability to determine prioritisation of call-flows to ensure the clients call is answered as quickly as possible. This will need to take into account the location and availability of the RM’s so that calls are routed first to RM’s working from the office and then to overflow to RM’s working on their mobile phones.
- A requirement to provide comprehensive Management Information to ensure that service-level targets are being met no matter where RM’s are working, how much time they are out of the office and against a fluctuating volume of clients.
While each of the above are individually achievable with many of the latest PBX and switch technology, in practice it becomes impossible to setup and maintain this type of service using premises-based equipment due to the complexities of setting up and maintaining these diverts. A better answer is to elevate this sort of business routing complexity to the cloud, where it can be managed online by business users (not PBX technicians) so that as the business requirements change these call-flows and other requirements are easily mapped into the cloud, independent of the voice network or infrastructure in the bank.
Being controlled through a web-portal, with call-flows and business logic residing in the cloud, this makes the delivery of calls business-led. It also allows the PBX estate to be ‘dumbed down’, which extends the life of the equipment, since all the call-routing and unified messaging aspects of call-flow are managed through the cloud, independent of the technicalities or limitations of the underlying voice infrastructure.
Quick Case Study
A major UK high-street bank had a problem in providing telephone support to its high-wealth and business customers. The main problem stemmed for two main reasons – firstly that the RM’s spent a great deal of time in face-to-face portfolio reviews with clients and then when they were free to take a call the average call length was usually fairly long. Both these meant that the chances of a client calling the RM and speaking in person to that RM was very low. As such, calls were going into voicemail, and if the client needed urgent attention they would typically try ringing back or call the main branch number to speak to anyone else able to assist them.
As far as the callers experience was concerned, this was very poor customer service. Infact, over a six month period when data was being captured, a callers had less than a 10% chance of speaking to anyone in person, and a much lower chance of speaking to their RM. Call abandonment rates were extremely high at over 60%, meaning that customers would put the phone down in frustration before they even had a chance of being served. Considering these were high-wealth customers, the most important segment of the market as far as profitability was concerned, something had to change.
The Solution
The bank decided to trial the BT SmartNumbers service, which is a cloud-based voice service that removes any geographic dependency on call-delivery. Call-flows and personal communication options can be configured in the cloud to meet the exact business needs of the client.
In the case of this bank, they decided to group the Relationship Managers into teams of 4 – 5. Each RM continued to have primary responsibility for their clients, but also had a collective responsibility for the clients of other team members. Calls to the RM would automatically overflow to their team if not answered quickly. Call whispering was enabled so that when the RM answered the call they would know if it was for them personally or was overflowed as a team call. Finally, they built in a second overflow so that even calls that were overflowed to the team would eventually overflow to dedicated staff in the contact-centre. As such, with the fine adjustment of timings, calls were ensured of being answered in person, by knowledgeable staff, within an agreed 45 second period – this being less than the average period of call abandonment. All of this was designed and configured in the cloud, and worked independent of the location of the RM’s so that even if they were out of the office, on the road or working from home the appropriate call-flows would be follwed.
The Result
After a 3 month trial of this new cloud-based service the results were very impressive. Call abandonment was reduced to single-figures, average call-answering in person increased from 30% to over 90% of calls. As a result, the bank has decided to roll this out across all their branches. Furthermore, with the enhanced management information they are getting from the system they don’t just feel that they are provided better support to their most important customers – they know without doubt.
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