During a conversion or new tech rollout at a financial institution, the focus usually centers on the technology itself. “The fancy new features!” “The exciting user interface!” “The time and energy savings!” But at the end of every transaction is a human being. If they’re not properly trained and supported, you won’t maximize the return on your technology investment.
For the new product to reach its full potential, your staff needs to be fluent in the new tech well before the launch date. Your people are your most effective promotional tool. They’re the ambassadors who are talking to customers every day. They need training to spot the right opportunities to introduce and promote the new technology and help customers start to use it. They should know how to steer conversations effortlessly toward what the digital product can do and why customers should give it a try.
Staff members also need training so they’re able to support customers as they gradually adopt the new tech. Customers who have questions about the tech will show up at branches and call the contact center. And when they do, your staff must have total product fluency to make sure customers have a positive digital customer experience.
Support Doesn’t End With Training
Initial training isn’t the end of the process. After you’ve trained staff in how to promote, use and support new technology, they need tools to support them in the flow of work. Frontline support can be very stressful without the right tools at hand to help.
Most of us have had the experience of being tech support for our parents. When they call, they’re already aggravated by unfamiliar technology, and you have to guide them through it blind. Their exasperation can affect you too, resulting in a bad experience for everyone involved. When these frustrations play out in the financial institution, the spillover of stress creates bad customer and employee experiences that can erode your customer base and drive costly staff turnover.
An Easy Way to Lose Customers:
If banking employees are frustrated, customers will inevitably feel the effect of that exasperation.
Helping customers who engage with your staff is just part of the challenge. Many customers don’t want to call or visit their financial institution for help using new technology. Younger generations in particular would rather figure it out on their own. When they visit your social channels or website, you need to offer effective support tools that guide them through transactions.
Technology walkthroughs and simulations provide a risk-free environment for them to experience technology and build the confidence to start using it for everyday banking. An added bonus: These tools can help reduce call center volume, freeing up staff to assist the customers who need them most. The right support tools will create a positive digital customer experience while showing customers and prospects that you’re serious about digital banking.
Going Beyond Tech Provision to Tech Support
For financial institutions implementing new technology, effective training and support tools are essential; for the fintech providers that supply that new tech, these tools can be a way to stand out from the competition. Conversions and rollouts are hugely disruptive experiences for institutions and their customers alike, so financial institutions generally look to their tech providers for solutions to make the process smoother.
Right now, most financial institutions don’t feel well supported by their tech providers when it comes to helping their staff and users through the process. A recent LemonadeLXP survey found that 75% of bankers rate their providers “mediocre” or “bad” in supporting them.
Clearly, a tech provider that offers better training and support has a major advantage in the marketplace, from increased adoption to higher transaction volumes to better ROI on client relationships.
Training and Support That Sticks
The key word when it comes to training and support is “effective.” There are plenty of systems out there that offer financial institutions basic tools to train staff and customers in using new tech. But if those tools aren’t engaging, the knowledge they teach won’t last long-term. Shallow training leads to shallow learning.
The most effective training and support tools don’t just tell staff and customers how to use the new tech, they walk them through it to drive confidence and fluency. Experience wins over explanation every time. Offering a lower-stakes opportunity to go step-by-step through the digital product not only takes the stress out of the process, it also ensures the knowledge gained actually sticks.
Experience vs. 'Book Learning':
Nothing beats the hands-on engagement of a walkthough to make people comfortable with new technology. It can be directed in person or remotely.
As an added bonus, technology walkthroughs can be built once and used in multiple ways: staff training, nested into product pages, piped into your website, displayed on your social pages, integrated into your chatbot and IVR and more.
Turning Staff into Digital Ambassadors
Every branch visit or contact center interaction is an opportunity to promote a bank or credit union’s new technology. To maximize the return on your new tech investments, you need to teach staff to spot opportunities to guide their customer conversations to a point where they can recommend your new tech.
One of the best ways to teach those skills is virtual role-play scenarios. These experiential training modules provide a risk-free environment for staff to learn to promote banking technology to customers. Once they’ve developed confidence in the virtual environment it will be much easier to apply those skills in real-world conversations.