Digital Assistants can help Credit Unions overcome member support challenges

“Personalized Touch” has been the cornerstone of Credit Unions that endeavor to provide exceptional support to their members. Members are increasingly dependent on seamless, on-demand services in all facets of their lives and expect the same from their Credit Unions. They can no longer interact with the credit unions during their busy workday. According to recent research, 81% of members want live support from member service representatives in off-peak hours – including late nights and weekends as this is when they get time away from their busy schedules. This accounts for more than 50% of the customer support queries in several Credit Unions. When members can’t find solutions to their queries, they are forced to reach out to customer support in the midst of their workday, which is inconvenient for them, and in several cases, this forces them to seek financial institutions that offer 24×7 support.

But can contact centers help improve customer satisfaction? Sadly, that is not the case as contact center operations can be notoriously inefficient with long training time for agents, absenteeism, high attrition amongst contact center employees ranging from 37%-44%, first call resolutions rates of only 70-75%, not to mention fatigued or agitated responses from human agents to customers. This leads to high inefficiencies in the contact center method of working.

Currently, 95% of credit unions do not have round the clock support, this could be both time-consuming and costly for Credit Unions and can affect their margins. Even Small and Mid-size Credit Unions, on average, spend around $50,000 every month on these operations and still have low member satisfaction scores.

To break away from the vicious circle of low customer satisfaction and high member support spends, several credit unions are actively investing in setting up Digital assistants across channels. Digital assistants can help to greatly improve customer experience, boost revenues, reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies.

Improve customer experience – In a recent study by the CFI Group, it was found that 72% of consumers seek to resolve their issue themselves and they are doing so across numerous channels like website, mobile application or social media. Digital assistants allow customers to get the answers they need at their convenience. Their ability to have several one-to-one conversations simultaneously help resolve queries much faster.

Lower support cost – Digital assistants are much cheaper than human agents, each mobile interaction has a variable cost of 10 cents vs $4 for human-agent interaction. They provide a great way to provide the first line of support by answering the high-volume inquiries that drive up support costs.

Increased product engagement – Most inquiries on digital assistants are FAQ based on products. The digital agents can talk in a human-like manner and understand their queries and offer solutions. Digital assistants can also use this opportunity to help in better product discovery, improve conversion rates, up-selling and cross-selling of products to the members.

Data-driven personalization – Digital assistants, leveraging the invaluable conversational data, provide insights into member behavior. Using this, every conversation can be personalized and be used by credit unions to proactively provide a better experience. Digital assistants are the key to ace customer experience.

Today, most Credit unions are looking to enhance customer experience, while attempting to reduce costs, boost revenues and improve operational efficiencies. Digital Assistants help them to achieve all these objectives seamlessly. They are cost-effective, have high availability and interact like humans. The Credit Unions that have already implemented digital assistants have seen savings of over 80% of their member service operational costs, a 30% increase in member satisfaction, and a 28% increase in revenues.

Read our blog on: 19 Ways an AI-Driven Customer Service Chatbot Improves CS and CX