Personalised voice services for extreme customer service

A SmartNumber with built-in voice continuity that follows you wherever you are, allowing you to stay in touch by landline, mobile or BlackBerry and work with virtual teams to deliver service excellence.

Protecting profitable relationships

Today’s bank customers have high expectations. They want to be able to contact their financial adviser at the time and via the channel that best suits them, and they expect a highly personalised and seamless service when they do. This means banks are faced with the challenge of delivering a personal service while continuing to cope with peaks and troughs in customer demand that are accentuated by the always-on 24-hour culture.

For relationship managers whose work often involves meeting the financial services needs of highwealth individuals or other important clients, delivering a consistent and attentive level of personal service is central to securing long-term and profitable relationships. And yet, research suggests that relationship managers spend as little as 20% of their time performing sales activities*.

Customers who are making high-value, time-critical decisions do not want to be greeted by voicemail or held in a call queue. Neither do they want to deal with a poor quality mobile connection or to call multiple times before getting through to someone who can only pass on a message.

So how do you give the clients you are meeting your personal and undivided attention while remaining constantly available for the next customer? The ability to respond to a call that comes in from one client while you’re meeting another is fundamental to the customer service experience and to maintaining customer loyalty.

The virtual team

Many banks are dealing with the problem by using virtual teams that include a handful of colleagues who are briefed on the collective pool of clients. This means that other team members (who may be working in the branch, a call centre or elsewhere) can field calls for you if you’re unavailable to take a call in person.

The BT SmartNumbers service ensures that in your absence calls can be routed to a member of your virtual team who can maintain the highest levels of customer experience.

A single point of contact for relationship managers

BT SmartNumbers allows you to both manage voice calls and guarantee service levels. You have a single telephone number (which may be either local, national or non-geographic) that follows you wherever you go. Calls from customers are directed both to your desk, and to your mobile phone in case you’re on the road.

Calls that are not answered immediately are routed to another member of your virtual team. They may also be answered by personalised voicemail if you prefer – but callers are always given the option to ‘press 0’ and speak to another team member in person.

You manage all aspects of your working environment through a simple web-browser application or telephone handset. With every call you are sent an email or SMS alert to let you know which client has called, and how the call was handled, and there are rich alert options for missed or important calls. One-click call back on your handset will then connect you either to the client, or to the team member who took the call. Unified messaging delivers all voicemail into email and circulates messages to other members of your virtual team.

Monitoring the customer experience

BT SmartNumbers also gives you detailed reports on all aspects of your clients’ service experience – from time to answer and call abandonment reports to how frequently voicemail greetings are being updated or messages checked.

Without any special equipment, relationship management administrators can manage and finetune the service from any location. Online monitoring screens and comprehensive management information (MI) reports that can be delivered in real time or weekly allow you to track the service experience of your most important clients.

Built-in voice continuity

BT SmartNumbers comes with built-in business continuity that helps you prepare for unforeseen events like fire, flood or bomb scares that may stop you taking customer calls. You can connect to the service from any location – from your home telephone, your mobile or your BlackBerry handset – and take calls from your customers. Alternatively your calls can be routed automatically to other colleagues or a backup service centre in the event of disruption. Voice services continue seamlessly, so your customers can call the usual number and get the same service they have come to expect.

The BT SmartNumbers service resides in the network which is fully resilient against failure both at a branch and local telephone exchange level. There is unlimited capacity for storage so voicemail can be archived indefinitely and retrieved if you need it.

* Booz Allen Hamilton survey 2005