Gone are the days when people need a reason to switch credit providers – it’s now essential that you give your customers a reason to stay
Why should a loan customer choose to stay with you? In a world where intelligent technology and open banking are changing the landscape of financial services, every company needs to be able to answer this question – or risk losing business.
But even as technology changes, people are still people, so if you make them feel valued and give them a reason to stay, many will. Companies can no longer wait until a customer has one foot out the door to try and change their mind – retention must be built into the entire service proposition from day one.
Retention is not only about keeping the customers that want to leave, it’s about keeping the customers you have, and given that it costs a business more to onboard new customers than it does to keep existing ones – it’s essential. You don’t always have to have the best interest rate either. It’s making sure customers are treated well, that they are happy with their loans and the service they receive.
Proactively offering customers better value for money before they knew they were looking for a better deal can go a long way to creating customer loyalty. We need to talk to customers, find out how they feel about the loan or credit they have. Do they need to consolidate other debts to save on repayments? Do they need to borrow additional funds or change the term of their current loan? A company’s efforts to consistently give their customers a good deal goes a long way to creating customer loyalty.
If a customer has an overdue invoice, it’s a prime time to get in touch make sure they have everything they need to make the payment. Maybe there is a reason they couldn’t make the payment this time, and it’s better to understand that as quickly as possible. We try to not only help the customer avoid additional fees and charges that they might face if they continue to miss payments, but also to help them get back on track and remain a profitable customer, who feels the company has done their best to look after them.
In a highly competitive market, some customers will always have their heads turned by seemingly better deals, so it’s impossible to avoid getting some cancellation calls. But what’s important is how they are handled, and leveraging the good relationship the customer already has with you to help them stay.
When we work with inbound termination calls, you need to quickly establish the reason behind it – have they seen a better deal elsewhere, have they come into some money and want to pay off the loan, or have they had a bad experience?
We work with every termination call to try and keep the customer, to see if we can offer them something better or understand how we can help them. If we can, they will probably stay.
A well-resourced team of specialists is essential to efficiently handle retention – proactively and reactively. This might sound obvious, but having the right resource to handle fluctuating call volumes can cause a big headache for many businesses who are sensitive to large spikes in inbound call volumes.
I’ve never heard of a customer that likes to be kept waiting, and efficient and timely call handling can help keep customer satisfaction at a high level.
We are driven not only by keeping the end customer happy, but to also by helping our customers to be successful. Having a long-serving team of specialists, and being able to efficiently steer call handlers to where they are needed most in reaction to call volumes, plays a big part in this.
Understanding how your customers feel about the service they receive is a solid way of helping to keep their business. Getting customers to evaluate your calls against parameters like engagement, simplicity, knowledge, problem solving, general satisfaction and answer time, can help you see where your retention efforts might be falling down – or exceeding.
When employees can directly access customer feedback, it can help them to see what works and what doesn’t work so well when they feel they’ve had a particularly good or bad call. Working towards customer scores being kept consistently high is essential, for staff morale as well as customer retention.
Using platform Brilliant Future, and taking an average of the six parameters above, we work to ensure that our customer satisfaction scores remain consistently ahead of our peers in financial services.
Regular customer contact at the right moment in time is key. If customers value what you do for them, they will be happy from the start – and will be more likely to stay until the end.
Find out more about TietoEVRY’s Financial BPO service and how it can help you keep more customers.
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TietoEVRY Credit Solutions awarded in Best Customer Service – Financial Services category