Digital Independence: How an innovative approach to digital banking empowers customers and contact centres alike
“The creation of the Digital Demos allows us to empower our clients and give them the ability to perform key tasks independently.”
Philippe Rincon, VP, Digital Banking, National Bank
Philippe Rincon, VP, Digital Banking, National Bank wants the digital banking experience to be on par with the most innovative industries. His mission as the head of a rapidly growing digital team is to transform the organization, while ensuring its focus remain customer-centric. Horizn spoke with Rincon about customer independence and how innovative digital solutions can become second nature.
Describe the evolution of National Bank’s digital marketing tactics over the last 12 months and how you now think about digital banking?
We had four key pillars we wanted to focus on: The first one is acquisition. Second, we wanted to increase the usage of our digital platforms. Third, we wanted to increase our client’s autonomy by providing them with simple online solutions that were accessible and reliable. And, finally, we wanted to provide our clients with the right support and guidance that would allow them to improve their financial knowledge and in turn help them make better decisions.
“With one simple click, our clients have access to a variety of Digital Demos, FAQs, a Chatbot, and an online support team where they get to chat with our agents.”
This is where the implementation of our Digital Demos played a key role. When we stepped back to evaluate our ability to support our clients in their digital journey, we determined that we needed to increase their independence by providing them with a one-stop shop where they could find all the right answers to their questions. We launched a digital help centre that amalgamated all our different resources and content types. With one simple click, our clients have access to a variety of Digital Demos, FAQs, a Chatbot, and an online support team where they get to chat with our agents. This has made us a lot more accessible to our clients by removing their need to call every time they need support.
“The creation of Digital Demos allows us to empower our clients and give them the ability to perform key tasks independently.”
How have Digital Demos become an essential part of your digital marketing strategy?
It’s essential to us that our clients are independent and have an excellent digital experience. Therefore, the creation of Digital Demos allows us to empower our clients and give them the ability to perform key tasks independently.
Even our contact centre agents have become accustomed to promoting our Digital Demos to our clients. Once they have answered their questions, they make sure to promote customers’ ability to find the right answers online using our various tools and referring them to all the self-serve options we have available.
Every new functionality launched on our digital platform — or even existing ones — all have the same purpose: to increase our client’s autonomy. Therefore for each of them, we need to provide clients with a Digital Demo that would allow them to use these functionalities independently.
“Our salesforce teams are always promoting Digital Demos throughout their conversations with our clients. It has become second nature to them!”
Can you expand on how you have used Digital Demos to support the contact centre?
One focus for the contact centre was to reduce the number of calls. And it always comes back to making our clients autonomous and being more accessible online.
As we know, this can be both a positive and negative experience for our clients, which can generate a lot more calls to our contact centre. Therefore, by providing them with the ability to learn new functionality through Digital Demos, we are mitigating the negative impact. Our salesforce teams are always promoting Digital Demos throughout their conversations with our clients. It has become second nature to them!
We also promote our Digital Demos on our social media platforms. So if a customer goes onto our Facebook page to ask for help, our online support team will provide them with the right answer and refer them to the Digital Demo associated with their question.
We’ve integrated the Digital Demos throughout our website, allowing customers to find answers to digital questions, increasing autonomy and decreasing calls to the contact centre. Digital Demos are also integrated into our Virtual Assistant (chatbot) — customers can ask questions, get a contextual answer and click on a Digital Demo to see how the feature works.
Looking ahead, what are you most excited about for 2022?
We are very excited about the upcoming year! We are looking forward to continuing to improve our digital platform and providing the best customer experience for our clients. Our clients will remain, as always, at the heart of our digital strategy.
We know that the pandemic has had a huge impact on our clients’ willingness to become more digital. They can now see its benefits and how accessible it can be for them. We want to keep them engaged and continue enabling them to use our digital platforms.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Watch the video above to see the full version.
