For Pam Dancisin, VP Marketing, Internet Project Manager, Dollar Bank, she spent 17 years in the contact center and she knows intimately how customer experience needed to improve.
“I grew up in the call center and worked there for 17 years,” Dancisin told attendees during her session at this week’s Forrester’s Forum for Customer Experience Professionals East in New York City. “I’ve seen both sides of it.”
Dollar Bank, a regional bank with more than 60 branch offices in southwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio metropolitan areas, has more than 50 contact center agents who work 12 hours a day on weekdays, and six hours on Saturday.
“The goal is to resolve your issue on the first call,” Dancisin said. “We want to make sure that if I can’t answer your question that the next person you talk to will answer your question. Agents need to tools to perform that function and meet the customer’s expectations.”
So how has Dollar Bank taken giant strides in improving its customer experience?
Dollar Bank, the largest independent mutual bank in the United States, is using IBM’s Tealeaf to make significant improvements to its online experience. Empowered by Tealeaf’s real-time insight into exactly what online customers see and do on the website.
Dollar Bank’s customer agents are much better able to immediately resolve the issues that cause customers to call for assistance. In the first month of using Tealeaf, Dollar Bank has shaved off nearly 40 seconds of its average handle time. More importantly, by quickly identifying and eliminating the obstacles that were causing online customers to struggle, Dollar Bank minimized the number of customers affected by these issues and the company experienced a 50% reduction in the number of web-problem forms they created.
Dollar Bank is deeply committed to supporting the needs of its customers, including providing them with the highest quality online banking services. In order to match its commitment to customer service, the company knew it needed to maintain an efficient online channel and turned to Tealeaf for powerful customer experience management. Using Tealeaf, Dollar Bank captures and records every interaction with each online customer, enabling them to identify the sources of customer struggle and gauge the business impact of these issues. This rich insight enables them to improve the customer experience, raise customer satisfaction and retention, reduce costs and improve their bottom line.
“Before Tealeaf, our agents didn’t have the ability to see what customers were doing on the website or within online banking,” Dancisin said. “Before Tealeaf, our agents would have to ask customers what kind of computer they were using, what browser, and which version. We wanted agents to be able to see what customers were experiencing. It’s very enlightening to find out what your customers are doing.”
Tealeaf helped Dollar Bank rectify the following situations:
· Customers conducting online banking couldn’t see the tabs across the top of the page. “We couldn’t figure out the problem,” Dancisin said. Tealeaf allowed us to see what the customers were experiencing. It showed us the different browsers people were using and we identified the browsers so programmers were able to correct what had been an ongoing problem.”
· Loan account applications: Customers were filling out nearly the entire application before failing to click on submit. “We found customers would get to the end and then they’d click on some button outside the location (such as searching for a particular branch), which would invalidate their whole application,” she said. “With the last two steps, we changed it so it opens its own window so you can’t click anywhere else and that significantly increased out conversion rates. Tealeaf really helped us with that and that was one we couldn’t uncover otherwise.”
· Treasury Management group handles business customers, who kept receiving random errors in the Cash Analyzer System. “We built Tealeaf alerts, which caused phone calls to be made and issues to be resolved.”
In the past, customers would fill out forms to resolve issues, which proved to be time consuming. With Tealeaf, Dollar Bank can identify what issues the customers are seeing.
“We quantify the issues we get in the call center now, go back to Tealeaf, and search similar experiences to justify to IT the need to fix it because the issue is affecting X number of customers,” Dancisin explained.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty 360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.