Building upon the success of Benchmarking Mobile Banking in Switzerland Today, Capco Digital is following up with several deep-dive blogs on selected topics from the survey.

Traditional retail banks have largely outdated client servicing models compared to challenger banks. They mostly rely on large contact centers that receive numerous phone-based queries. In Switzerland, this kind of service needs to be offered and maintained in four languages. It is not to mention that one customer support representative can only answer a single query at a time, during office hours. Rather than being able to use this customer interaction to generate new business, the contact center must mainly deal with transactional queries.

THE THREE PILLARS OF GREAT CUSTOMER SUPPORT

Mobile apps can help to reduce the cost of customer support and even enhance the customer experience. Although Swiss banks are investing heavily in this area, they often do so in the wrong domains. We see plenty of investments in video calls, chatbots, live chat systems and automated voice recognition. Yet, none of these experiences put the customers and their needs at the center – they only alleviate pain for the bank.

We assert that the strongest enhancement to customer experience can be achieved through asynchronous chat. This means providing a conversational interface from familiar apps such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger and allowing customers and support staff to answer queries asynchronously while limiting the waiting time to a maximum of 18 hours. This model is rarely explored, as banks maintain a paradigm that support needs to be instant. While this is true for some cases, most users are used to waiting for a response, as many of them do in their daily lives.

The same experience can be translated to a mobile banking app context. Furthermore, an in-app asynchronous chat allows for a more in-depth conversation, less pressure on the contact center agent and full authentication as well as security. We see the following pillars as key to this experience:

• Provide asynchronous messaging: Apps should have a conversational user interface that allows users to message the bank at any time of the day. The experience needs to be as fluid and dynamic as known from popular messaging apps today.
• Provide dynamic FAQs: Access to a help catalog can be incredibly useful if done well. This might be a simple FAQ section for users to browse topics or a chatbot- driven tool embedded into the same conversational user interface as the asynchronous messaging.
• Appointment booking: As an embedded part of the experience, appointment booking should be possible in-app. This functionality has an increased importance when wanting to convert potential leads into qualified leads, especially for investment products or mortgages which still rely on physical bank branches. In-context appointment bookings often lead to higher-quality leads and reduced no-show rates.

BENCHMARKING MOBILE BANKING IN SWITZERLAND TODAY

Our review of 16 traditional and challenger banks across Europe and Switzerland revealed that Swiss banks still need to catch up in this space.

OUR RECOMMENDATION 

Based on our study, we concluded that secure mailboxes are considered a commodity nowadays, as they offer a secure and trusted way to interact with customers. Although Swiss banks are ahead of the game in terms of physical contact offerings, self-service and digital support options, such as asynchronous messaging and dynamic FAQs, should be further improved. This is further supported given the recent usage increase of mobile and online channels as well as the associated costs with physical channels.

CONTACT
 
Nils Reimelt, Managing Principal
M +41 79 135 85 22
E nils.reimelt@capco.com