5 customer experience tips for consumer lending businesses

Consumer lending plays an important role in the financial services industry, providing customers with the necessary funds to make purchases, investments, and other financial decisions.

If you’re in this industry, you’ll probably agree that the success of a consumer lending business isn’t just determined by the amount of loans issued – it’s also heavily influenced by the quality of the overall CX provided.

In this article, we explore a few ways how the consumer lending industry can develop great CX, and, ultimately, build long-term value for both lenders and customers.

1. Taking accessibility to new levels

The consumer lending industry often helps to provide financial support to those who can’t always attain it via traditional means – e.g. personal loans via mainstream banks. Therefore, making your business and services as accessible as possible is a must.

One way to improve accessibility is through the use of omnichannel communications. Rather than limiting customers to individual channels – i.e. telephone – omnichannel allows them to attain the support and advice they need through a number of different ways. This can include email, live chat, instant messaging, and social media – whichever is more convenient to your potential and existing customers.

With the right omnichannel contact center software, agents have a detailed overview of customer history across all channels, meaning that the customer doesn’t need to repeat the information they already provided. This eliminates one of the top three frustrations regarding contact centers. What’s more, agents are able to switch between channels anytime – for example, they can send out a contract via email while still on the phone with a customer, allowing for quicker resolution times.

Check out a few real-life examples in this video:

2. Empowering customer self-service

The implementation of customer self-service tools has been on the rise for a while now, with apps and online platforms being commonplace for consumer lending companies. With 61% of customers preferring a mix of self-service options and human agents, empowering customers to handle requests independently (perhaps through IVR) is definitely worth considering.

Interactive voice response (IVR) is ideally placed to support customers in handling queries and requests. Using just their telephone, a customer can conduct activities such as balance inquiries and tracking loan applications.

IVR is an entirely automated process. Customers are greeted by a prerecorded message and keypad options to help them navigate the call. The function can be used entirely as a self-service option or to help a caller reach the most appropriate representative. While it helps customers resolve their own requests, it also can significantly reduce any unnecessary time spent on the phone by agents.

Consumer lending businesses can further benefit from IVR by combining it with a swift and secure over-the-phone payment method. This gives customers the option to make loan repayments using just their telephone keypad to input card details without any agent involvement. This type of functionality can also be applied to outbound IVR. For example, where the system automatically contacts certain customers who are late with overdue payments and offers the option to make repayments on the same automated call.

Discover more ways IVR can personalize customer experience in this free, on-demand webinar.

3. Building value through communication

With typically higher interest rates compared to a personal bank loan, it’s an important responsibility of consumer lending businesses to provide financial education to their customers. This can include helping them to better understand their respective financial situations and make informed decisions.

Helping to inform and educate customers builds trust, brand loyalty, and a better overall CX.

One example would be creating informative materials (e.g. blogs or brochures) explaining consumer lending and its key components. This could cover an array of topics such as clearly defined product benefits, information on repayment schedules, or advice on responsible lending.

What’s more, the distribution of this type of information can be automated through using platforms such as HubSpot, and can be integrated with your CRM or call management software.

4. Considering the remote factor

The rise of the virtual contact center has presented various benefits to businesses throughout the past few years, including cost savings, scalability, and global access to agent talent pools.

The use of remote agents can improve agent availability in new time zones and provide multilingual service – all while keeping financial data secure with cloud technology.

This was very much the case for consumer lender, 4finance. The firm had aims of global expansion but this was hindered by challenges in adapting to infrastructure across new geographical locations. 4finance adopted a single cloud contact center solution, VCC Live, to replace its physical telephony system to better serve customer markets. Since its implementation, the firm has been able to quickly scale to new locations, better handle peak call periods, and collectively increase active talk time with customers.

5. Learning from customer data

CX and customer analytics are very much interconnected; you can’t improve the first without understanding the second.

Some examples of how using data to improve the CX in consumer lending include:

• Personalized offerings such as tailored loan packages through building strong awareness of the customers’ unique needs
• Service improvement by understanding customer pain points and applying this knowledge to how you can better serve them
• Relationship management by using data to recognize the unique situations of customers – e.g. identifying customers at risk of defaulting on their loans and taking steps to prevent it

Customer data is an incredibly powerful asset because it can drive significant performance improvement. But how can consumer lending companies obtain this data and easily compile it in a way to draw meaningful trends?

One example would be using a CRM, such as Salesforce. In the case of consumer lending, you can build detailed profiles based on your specific customer demographics (e.g. income, credit history and occupation). This will help you better understand unique customer needs so that you can tailor your offerings accordingly.

Another example is using reporting mechanisms to gain a holistic awareness of your interactions with customers. This can include tools such as real-time contact center dashboards in which you can comprehensively view your customer’s experience. Dashboards can be customized with completely unique CX metrics, and these can be continually monitored to ensure optimal levels of performance.

VCC Live in the consumer lending industry

Through our cloud contact center software, we partner with consumer lenders to help them deliver a strong CX. Keep customers engaged, automate communications, boost self-service, and always stay secure with VCC Live.