SMS, voice messaging and web chat will achieve little if they are not joined up and linked to routine business processes, but the financial services sector doesn’t seem to have realised this yet

As innovative as financial services providers consider themselves to be in their use of new technology, the reality often falls a good way short. Early experimentation with interactive messaging is the latest example. More often than not the channel has been added as a way of seeming more ‘relevant’ to today’s customers, rather than to solve a real problem – of which the industry faces many.

One of these is the need to be more closely and dynamically engaged with customers across multiplying communication channels, to boost satisfaction and drive revenue. Online retailers are good at this, flitting seamlessly between the different media to complete transactions, confirm and arrange next steps and generally keep customers informed.

Financial services organisations too need to convert new customers, nurture and sell back to existing ones, and recover missed payments – without pushing up operational overheads or having to send services off shore. So they too must now become cleverer at harnessing real-time communications.

Take Clarity Credit Management. It has seen a fourfold increase in collections revenue by intervening earlier with delinquent accounts – using dynamic voice and text messaging to prompt customers to settle their accounts.

Before, it was managing only a 40% right-person contact rate and even then only 50% completions. Now, using a managed cloud-based service on a pay-as-you-go basis, Clarity issues daily reminders by automated voice or text message with the result that 65% of calls are now inbound and customers therefore much more likely to pay up. The cost to reach the right person and the cost per pound collected per agent have dramatically reduced too. The 200% increase in collections has been achieved with only 25% more agent resource.

What’s more, users are able to create their own outbound campaigns in minutes, encouraging experimentation: powerful performance metrics allow activities to be continuously honed until they get the best results possible.

What the Clarity example shows is that it isn’t enough simply to buy the latest technology and tick a box. Application is everything.

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