Financial technology (fintech for short) first came to light in the early days of the 21st century. It refers to new technology intended to automate and improve the area of financial services, both in terms of efficiency and customer relations. In short, if a technology can digitize, streamline, or optimize something to do with financial services, it’s fintech.
While much of fintech is oriented toward improving the internal processes of financial organizations, some companies are also looking to fintech to help refine their customer service experience through automation, data analysis, and more. Here, we’ll take a look at a few of the ways fintech can be used to improve your company’s customer support.
Challenges Fintech Companies Face
Ironically, the progress and development of technology can, in turn, create new technological challenges for companies. Here are a few of the challenges currently facing fintech companies.
Managing large volumes of data. There’s more data being generated daily than ever before, and there comes a point where traditional techniques of processing it are simply no longer feasible. That’s when AI or machine learning must step in and make massive amounts of data more manageable.
Slow processing of applications, claims, etc. As the volume of customers and customer requests increases, the time necessary to get all those requests processed will likely also increase. This can lead to frustration as customers find themselves waiting to get their account, transaction, or claim approved.
Service outages. The good news is, there are more ways for customers to interact and access things than ever before. The bad news is, there are also many ways for those services to go down. If an ATM, website, or mobile app goes down, the customer may be left high and dry — again leading to some major frustration.
Security breaches. Keeping a customer’s data secure is of utmost importance to any fintech company, and there are more data breaches happening all the time. Making sure customer data is secure can be an outright arms race.
How Fintech Companies Can Improve Their Customer Support
So what can fintech companies do to help meet these challenges and offer up a better customer service experience? Here are a few ways.
Provide 24-hour support. It’s the 21st century, and the time of working on “banker’s hours” is long past. Customers want to be able to complete their financial transactions or manage their accounts any time of the day or night, and fintech companies should take steps to make that happen (if they haven’t already).
Provide multi-channel support. Customers love having choices, particularly when it comes to being able to connect with a company. Not everyone loves making a phone call to try to get answers or support out of a company. Providing access along a variety of channels — text, live chat, social media, website, email, and so on — is a great way to make life easier for customers.
Implement a cloud-based help desk system. To go along with those many support channels, companies should have a quality cloud-based help desk system that integrates with those channels when it comes to ticketing, and automatically tags and routes queries to where they need to go in order to speed up dispute resolution and / or support requests.
Digitize processes. Information is moving faster than ever before, and customers want to get things resolved and taken care of quickly. No one is excited about mailing in a letter and waiting for a claim or dispute to get resolved. For example, some insurance companies now provide digital portals for customers to upload photos of their damaged cars, quotes from repair shops, police reports, and more. The faster this information moves to and from the company, the happier customers are going to be.
Using artificial intelligence. AI is proliferating throughout the business world, and it’s not only a way to help deal with massive volumes of data, but can also be used to improve the customer experience through chatbots, personalized marketing, predictive analysis, and more.
Provide self-service options. More and more industries are working toward letting customers do things themselves, and the digital age has made this idea much more feasible. Letting customers access company information, process transactions, or do calculations (such as online mortgage calculators) reduces stress on personnel and provides more convenience for customers.
Offer incentives and rewards. Digital rewards such as lower insurance rates or cheaper bank fees for customers with policies and accounts in good standing are easier to deploy with the help of automated systems, AI, and data analytics. Ideally, there’s no need for service reps to assess and assign these bonuses and incentives — it’s handled automatically by software.
Using data analytics to improve customer service. One of the cornerstones of good business is finding out what works and what doesn’t. Data analytics are a superior way to distinguish between those two things and put your focus on what’s working for the company.
