Being able to deliver a great support experience is something that can create lifelong loyalty from customers and members. Every time someone reaches out to your bank or credit union’s support team for help solving a problem, you’re given an opportunity to reinforce the trust they have in your institution and the handling of their money.
There are myriad reasons why someone would need to reach out to their financial institution’s support team. Some problems require a skilled support agent to investigate and take urgent action, but many issues can easily be resolved by the user themselves. And at times of increased support contact, having non-urgent issues flooding your support queues can prevent your team from quickly addressing more urgent issues. To help the financial institutions we work with avoid overwhelmed contact centers, we decided to rethink the support experience.
Our solution was to develop a self-service approach – one that meets the customer and member where they are and empowers them to choose the form of contact that works best for them.
We’re excited to announce our new support hub as part of our digital consumer and business banking platforms. This new self-service hub is designed to help your users find the answers they need quicker and steer them to the support channels they prefer, in turn speeding up your team’s ability to resolve urgent issues.
The guiding principle behind the support hub is a personalized omni-channel strategy that’s designed to be inviting and offer people multiple options for finding answers. For simple tasks, surveys have shown that a majority of people prefer to find the answers themselves and rarely struggle to find the information they need when presented with a support portal. This approach also allows institutions to steer support traffic away from slower channels – like phone support and email – and instead to relevant knowledge base resources.
At the heart of the support hub experience is the new message center. Here, people can start a support conversation where they can explain the issue they’re needing help with, attach relevant documents, and even assign the message to a specific department within the financial institution. And as a native experience within the digital banking platform, the message center is also the most secure form of communication between your financial institution and your end-users.
Through the message center, your support agents and users can easily communicate within a cohesive message thread. This way, people can open a new conversation thread for separate issues and easily keep track of their active conversations directly in the message center.
Conversation threads are also searchable and automatically separated between “recent” conversations and “older” support conversations. And in a similar fashion to your email inbox, older conversations are never erased and can be reopened if the need ever arises.
The self-service aspect of our new support hub is best highlighted with FAQs and quick links. These two support channels give people the opportunity to resolve smaller tasks themselves and avoid having to call support or wait for a response to a support message. Empowering your customers and members to solve easy issues themselves is also a somewhat counterintuitive way to make them more satisfied with your service.
The FAQ section is, naturally, a great place to provide answers to the most common support issues. Having information in this centralized location is also helpful in providing more explanation around your features or in surfacing educational content, like providing relevant loan and assistance information to businesses seeking PPP loans.
For issues that require a deeper-dive, Quick Links provide a clear path to the information or action people need to take to find a resolution. Take, for instance, one of the most common issues support centers address: needing to reset a password. With Quick Links, credit unions and banks can link users directly to a password reset page where they can manually reset their password without ever having to open a support ticket.
In the “Institution Settings” of the Narmi Admin portal, institutions can customize the channels and support content presented to users. Having this flexibility allows your internal teams to quickly update FAQs and Quick Links, add new support channels, and have more control over the support experience you’re extending to your customers and members without ever having to reach out to Narmi.
To learn more about the new support hub experience in our digital banking platform, schedule some time to chat.
