Heightened customer expectations for anytime, anywhere services, growing competition, and shifting workplace trends are putting new pressures on the financial services industry. RingCentral’s second annual Customer Success Metrics Survey in Financial Services shows that deploying a cloud-enabled communications and collaboration platform can be a powerful tool for meeting customer expectations and driving value across the organization.
Delivering significant benefits for employees and customers
According to the results of our recent survey, which included the opinions of executives and decision makers at financial services organizations in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, RingCentral delivers significant internal and customer-facing benefits that position their organizations for success in this rapidly changing climate.
In recent years, as new online products and services have emerged from financial services organizations, a growing number of customers have come to expect flexible, personalized mobile offerings. This trend has increased the need for digital transformation. For example, banks have seen an all-time high for mobile logins and check deposits along with spikes in call center interactions; insurance companies have observed increased use of digital tools for claims processing and call center inquiries; and mortgage lenders have experienced record numbers of online applications and loan servicing inquiries.
“Financial institutions recognize that the convenience and growth of digital services are leading to lasting customer shifts. Simultaneously, changes to traditional workplace models mean the industry must address the challenges of remote and hybrid work to maintain productivity and customer satisfaction.”” states Matthew Lehman, Industry Principal for Financial Services at RingCentral. “For financial institutions to remain competitive, they must focus on both customer and employee needs. A unified communications platform, enhanced with AI to leverage the latest innovations, is a key component of a broader digital transformation strategy to meet this challenge and augment productivity.”
Cloud communications driving value in financial services with RingCentral
57%
Increase in employee satisfaction
37%
Increase in customer satisfaction
26%
Overall ROI
Real-life gains for RingCentral financial services customers
Our survey asked 189 RingCentral financial services customers about the real-life gains they’re experiencing from deploying our all-in-one messaging, video, and phone (RingEX™) solutions and our Contact Center solutions (RingCX and RingCentral Contact Center), and the findings revealed key benefits that address these employee and customer experience pressures.
Some key findings include:
57% increase in employee satisfaction
Remote and hybrid work can result in unintentional barriers to productivity, including departmental silos and the need for multiple apps to collaborate and share information. RingCentral eliminates many of these pain points and promotes more effective and efficient work, delivering an average 39% increase in employee productivity and a 14% decrease in employee attrition.
37% increase in customer satisfaction
Customers expect seamless, personalized, and fast service across all channels, and customer service has become a key differentiator in the fight to win and retain business across all financial services. There’s a direct line between the capabilities RingCentral can provide to financial institutions and their ability to meet these growing customer demands, resulting in a 37% boost in customer satisfaction satisfaction (CSat) among financial services organizations that use our solutions.
26% overall ROI
Oftentimes, replacing legacy infrastructure and providing the tools financial services organizations need to better serve customers and employees can be costly—but not necessarily so. Shifting to the cloud can provide significant cost savings, including easier and faster configuration, deployment, and management, as well as reduced hardware spend, all while enabling more productive work. Together these savings and operational efficiencies add up to an average 26% return on investment.
22% increase in revenue growth
Deploying cloud communications, collaboration, and contact center solutions simplifies communications and drives value and revenue growth across the enterprise. Many customers prefer interacting digitally, ushering in a new era of sales and opportunities, especially for organizations embracing UCaaS and modern cloud contact centers. A unified communications platform enables financial institutions to meet customers wherever they are through tools like:
- Voice, video, digital, and social channels: Offering multiple communication methods enhances the customer experience.
- CRM platform integrations and calling campaigns
- Click-to-Dial
- Call transfers, call forwarding, and intelligent routing
- Call analytics and reports
- IVR and skills-based routing: Efficiently direct customers to the appropriate agent, reducing wait times and improving satisfaction.
- Outbound dialers: Proactively engage with customers for follow-ups, surveys, or updates.
- Self-service AI: Handles common queries, freeing agents to focus on more complex issues.
Integrating RingCentral with a CRM platform (such as Salesforce, Zoho, and Hubspot) helps track sales activities and prompts sales reps with a structured and integrated campaign of set touchpoints such as calls, emails, and SMS texts. This supported cadence helps sales reps maintain consistent, deliberate communications across various channels, leading to higher contact and conversion rates and providing management with more accurate data in sales reporting.
14% decrease in average handle time
AI-supported self-service is essential for modern customer support, efficiently addressing common queries and freeing agents for complex issues. Key features include intelligent virtual agents for voice and digital, real-time AI agent assist, and smooth transitions to live agents, ensuring a seamless customer experience.With RingCentral’s Contact Center solutions, financial institutions see an average 14% decrease in average handle time when it comes to resolving customer inquiries and issues. This equates to better customer experience and better customer retention.
Supporting digital transformation for financial services organizations of any size
To demonstrate the power of RingCentral in supporting financial services organizations in the digital era, there are no better examples than Altura Credit Union and SCM Insurance. Altura Credit Union is one of the largest credit unions on the West Coast, offering a full suite of banking services—credit cards, home loans, auto loans, checking and savings accounts, investment services, etc.—to more than 160,000 members in counties across Southern California. Altura’s on-prem phone system was over 15 years old and was already showing its limitations when the credit union was serving 80,000 members. But by the time that number had doubled to 160,000, Altura’s contact center teams—as well as the rest of the organization—knew it was time for a more modern phone system. As a member-focused organization, the biggest driver for them to upgrade their telephony was to improve contact center operations.
By implementing a cloud-based RingCentral Contact Center, Altura’s support operations added flexibility and capabilities it never had before. For example, it solved a serious challenge affecting Altura’s call center agents’ ability to work remotely. According to Turhan Hunt, Altura’s VP of Member Services, “With RingCentral, we can now record every member call, no matter where our agents are, and automatically store the recording securely in the cloud.”
“With RingCentral’s analytics tools, we can monitor our callers’ journeys…and what if any pain points they encounter. That level of visibility—which we’ve never had—is going to help us make Altura’s service better for our members.”
Turhan Hunt, VP of Member Services, Altura Credit Union
For SCM Insurance, the largest independent, privately owned provider of claims and risk management services in Canada, mobilizing the company’s huge nationwide team to provide local support after a regional catastrophe was difficult and more expensive than it needed to be. One culprit? SCM’s disjointed network of legacy phone systems. And with 60% of its workforce primarily based in the field, the company also struggled with how to help employees stay connected and productive while on the road.So they turned to RingCentral’s unified communications platform RingEX to provide a consistent communications system and user experience for all employees.
As Mike Ackroyd, Chief Information Officer for SCM Insurance Services, explains some of the benefits of the new system, “Now we can quickly spin up local numbers for any region affected by a disaster. We can easily provide local phone numbers to our staff that have mobilized to support the disaster—and give the victims reassurance that they’re getting help from someone close by.”
In addition to helping its clients, SCM Insurance has found its new cloud communications solutions help the company’s own bottom line. Ackroyd goes on to add, “With RingCentral, we’ve reduced our costs by 50% by removing dormant phone numbers and getting our expenses for toll-free and long-distance charges back under control. That’s delivering significant savings for SCM Insurance Services.”
A closer look at the RingCentral advantage
Throughout our Customer Success blog series, we take a closer look at the RingCentral advantage as indicated by overall survey results and explore some of the specific improvements seen across key business segments and within industry vertical markets.
Originally published Aug 05, 2022, updated Aug 14, 2024
