We are now a couple of months in the new way of life – a life with COVID-19. As many areas of business have changed or adjusted to the new, social distancing reality, so has the customer service. Companies that managed to keep or exceed customer service satisfaction were certainly the ones that leveraged technology as an ally in this pursuit.
NLB Montenegro’s strategic approach to technology has allowed them to keep their business resilience and serve the customers in the most need time – the time when health crisis came hand in hand with financial crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world to its roots. Businesses suddenly had to change the way they operate and adjust in order to meet customer needs and expectations. Financial services had a particularly challenging task to manage the changing financial landscape of their customers and to answer the increasing number of requests to address financial stability, debts, payments and other problems the customers massively started to experience.
Banks suddenly started to have an increasing number of calls and contacts over different communication channels, making it harder to keep the customer service on a high level while keeping the employees safe in a new, social distancing reality. The ones that adjusted fast and managed to answer to this challenge were certainly the ones who leveraged technology as an ally in this combat.
NLB Montenegro is an example of such a bank, managing to deliver premium customer service in the era of pandemics through smart and efficient organization of its Contact Centar department, helped with the contemporary Contact center technology to assist these efforts.
Leveraging technology in the domain of customer service
As a bank that follows technology trends, NLB is constantly working on improving all segments of business through technological innovations. This also applies to the customer service segment, in particular, to its specialized Contact Center department.
NLB Contact Center deals with around 600 customer calls on a daily basis, serving as help and support, for better understanding of products, for reporting irregularities, for giving information about any question or problem the customer experiences.
In 2018. NLB decided to strategically invest in equipping the Contact Center with a new software solution that would allow for an even better serving of customers, faster response, centralized monitoring and organization of the department, and overall higher customer satisfaction rate. For this purpose, NLB became a user of the Logate Contact Center solution.
With Logate Contact Centar, the NLB team got an upgraded working environment ready for the next level of service.
Contact Center department organization and customer satisfaction
After implementing the new Contact center software system in 2019, NLB bank managed to connect various channels of communication with clients into a single, centrally managed unit. Now their Contact center team was able to communicate through a single application with clients who contacted the bank through phone calls, web chat, NLB viber chatbot, SMS and email.
The department was equipped with a tool that allowed for fast and efficient solving of customer problems through skill-based routing and connection with other software systems that allowed for easy task forwarding to experts.
As the system was centralized, it allowed for easy communication between operators and the management, exchanging information, providing insightful reports and tracking KPIs that gave the management an insight into performance of its Contact center department.
Automating the Contact center operations, NLB bank also automated campaigns, allowing for faster and more exact information delivery to thousands of customers.
However, the importance of having stable and scalable IT infrastructure in the Contact Center department came into play in the time of crisis – when workload doubled and crisis forced a change in working conditions.
Keeping the flexibility of the working environment
The characteristics of a stable and long term financial institution is its ability to stay resilient to changing environment and conditions in which business is done. The new COVID-19 pandemic has shaken entire companies, customer service not being left behind.
In the changing business landscape, NLB bank responded by quickly switching to work-from-home mode, keeping the employees safe, and customers not waiting.
Thanks to the IT infrastructure of NLB bank, their dedicated IT team and Logate Contact Center development team, the 7 full time operators were able to respond to over 25,000 customers calls in a single month, since the epidemic started, from their homes.
The number of calls is still increasing, having agents handle between 600 and 1500 calls on a daily basis.
“During the challenging times, our main focus was to keep serving our customers, especially as their needs were affected by the pandemic. That’s why we aimed to quickly and efficiently organize our Contact center team to work remotely while still being at disposal for any customer requests or problems. Logate Contact Center solution enabled us to adjust quickly and Logate engineers were there to support our infrastructure in the times of increased workload. This way, we became the first ones in the NLB group to successfully organize the new working environment. We are proud to have managed to keep the productivity level and continuity of work while responding to many challenging customer requests over the last two months.”
Next level customer experience – video calls
As the COVID-19 imposes a new lifestyle, NLB is closely listening to clients’ needs and adjusting the business to meet them in a timely manner. That’s why they are planning for a new feature for their Contact center software. Video calls feature will allow customers to have a video conversation with Contact Center agents and allow for more information to be transferred through this type of call. The safety of both clients and employees will be enhanced as video calls will further reduce the need to visit branch offices.
NLB is proving why technological advancement is necessary in customer service. It kept the business agile, resilient and able to adapt and stay relevant even in the times of global crisis.
How has your company leveraged technology in customer service?
