Customer experience and trust are closely intertwined. In a time of instant gratification, customers expect more.

They expect callback options. They expect to open a chat window on your website and get a near-instant reply. They expect that you already know who they are when they call, that you’re aware of their most recent order, and you understand what they need next. And they certainly don’t want to repeat their information.

Failing to check off these boxes puts customer trust on the line.

The events of the past two years to date have shown how trust has become an important business imperative. In fact, Forrester Consulting’s 2022 predictions report revealed that Asia-Pacific’s financial services industry will be the first industry to demonstrate their commitment to customer relationships with trust as a formal metric.

Trust is built when a company listens to its customers and takes action to augment customer experiences. This rings true as 90% of Singapore consumers in Salesforce’s 2022 State of the Connected Customer survey say that the experience is just as important as a brand’s product.

And central to positive customer experiences is personalisation; this comes down to understanding customer data.

Businesses without analytics are walking away from significant customer experience gains  

Customer trust is hard won and more important than ever.

For financial services companies, providing individualised customer service begins from the most fundamental touchpoint for many companies — the contact centre.

Critical to the contact centre’s quality of service is the ability to understand changing customer needs. Service agents must have a single view of customer data across channels and departments. They also need to access financial transaction data (e.g. credit card, investments, loans) from systems outside the organisation. Driving insights from this treasure trove of data is key to crafting an unrivalled and personalised customer experience.

Here’s a scenario. Chris, a business decision-maker in a bank, can explore a contact centre agent performance dashboard to have a complete view of how long cases have been opened for against the average CSAT (consumer satisfaction) per agent. He notices that a few agents have a particularly high caseload and are struggling to resolve the problem.

With a 360-degree view of all customer interactions and AI-powered predictions, Chris anticipates a drop in CSAT as a handful of customers received a corporate offering in error. To keep CSAT for future cases as high as possible, Chris decides he wants to coach the team on making better use of their case escalation processes, and drafts an updated talk track about a special offer for his team to leverage when speaking to these impacted customers. Taking proactive action like this helps increase customer satisfaction across the board. In just minutes, Chris can set a plan in motion and understand how the organisation is trending to plan based on customer retention scores and target areas of concern quickly.

The good news: Not only is analytics a powerful resource for informing day-to-day decisions, it can also catch problems that have gone unnoticed. This is how line-of-business employees can go from data, to insight, to action with agility.

Case in point: Sompo Asia, a leading property and casualty insurance provider, has its marketing, claims, pricing, and product teams — along with the CEO — all looking at the same dashboards to drive operational efficiencies. Today, the insurer has reduced its claims turnaround time for motor vehicle repairs by about 20% and deepened its relationship with customers.

Analytics can transform your business from a cost centre into a revenue driver

Clearly, the right tools can go a long way in mobilising sales and service teams to connect more closely with customers and better predict outcomes to help the bottomline, especially as we navigate a trust economy in a climate where businesses are grappling to do more with less.

With predictive analytics, companies can curate more relevant cross-selling offers for every customer, and guided workflows can enable agents to resolve concerns more quickly, freeing up their time to convert other leads to opportunities.

Remember, customers are indifferent to who in a company owns the individual experience of billing, onboarding, or servicing calls. Through their eyes, these are all part of the same journey.