Are you changing your digital banking platform? As you focus on getting the technology right to remember to also keep the employee training and customer experience at the forefront. If your employees are not prepared and adequately trained to use your system, you could end up with frustrated customers, low adoption or even attrition.

A digital banking conversion can be a highly stressful change event similar to a mass card reissue or core conversion. Putting the customer experience at the center of the conversion journey will drive adoption, utilization and optimization. A proactive approach ensures customers know what to expect, feel good about the change and are fully prepared to take advantage of the new platform. This goal improves the customer experience and your bottom line.

These are some best practices to ensure an optimal migration experience:

Plan your work and work your plan

Your conversion migration plan should prioritize an exceptional customer experience. This plan serves as a roadmap of critical tasks, milestones and due dates for each phase and wave of the digital migration, along with deliverables, dependencies and resource needs. Having a clear conversion plan helps your team remain organized and best position your financial institution to achieve its service level objectives.

Remember that project plans are intended to be aspirational, not fixed in stone. So, treat your plan as a living and evolving document to guide cross-functional teams and capture executive decisions that alter the project scope.

Stay engaged with frontline team

Ensure your frontline team understand the benefits of the migration to your digital platform. This will allow your customer-facing contact center support agents, line-of-business employees and treasury management officers to explain the perks of online conversion to your customers.

You should also provide regular updates about developments and changes to keep them in the loop. Awareness, clarity and engagement are critical to a smooth transition.

Maintain leadership involvement

Executive buy-in must be one of your first priorities when planning a digital conversion. Bring in senior leadership early and communicate with them often. This will help alleviate their concerns and ensure the project progresses smoothly from inception to completion.

For the best chance of success, get early leadership oversight and an executive sponsor who will maintain visibility into the roadmap for other executive team members. Having an executive sponsor also ensures targets are hit, the project stays on track and your team maintains urgency and accountability.

Prioritize proactive customer engagement

Don’t wait until the digital platform is ready for launch before reaching out to your customers. It takes customers a year or more to recover from a significant change — even a good one. Proactive customer engagement ensures satisfaction and speeds up recovery time.

So, reach out to your customers pre-conversion to ensure full adoption, utilization and optimization of the platform. You need proactive and pragmatic outbound communications, inbound support and training to protect and retain your customer relationships.

Invest in proactive education and training

Education and training are essential to exposing failure points and improving the customer experience. Provide one-to-one, high-touch training to high-value customers as well as group webinars and self-service training options for everyone.

Proactive training will reduce call volume and handle times, not to mention frontline team stress. But the more important long-term win is a positive customer experience.

Staff for spikes in call volume

While proactive engagement, outreach and training will reduce call volume and handle times, you can still expect your high-value customers to have questions. Inbound contact center support is vital to the success of your conversion.

Scale up your contact center with skilled inbound-overflow support so customers get the answers they need when they need them. Augmenting staff, either on your own or through an experienced third-party provider, provides an essential security net to assist quickly and efficiently.

Survey customers post-conversion

It can take time for customers to familiarize and become proficient with your new digital platform. The digital conversion journey must include this learning curve.

Engage your customers post-conversion by sending them surveys to assess satisfaction and determine if the new platform is being fully utilized. A low satisfaction rating is an equally important measure, as it indicates potential attrition.

Consider the benefits of partnering with an experienced third party

Outsourcing your contact center allows your institution to have additional capacity and best practices, proven processes and expertise to streamline workflows, address call volume uncertainties and optimize scheduling.

You can also save through outsourcing as it eliminates in-house setup, training, project management, production support costs and more. Other benefits of outsourcing include ease and speed of setup, enhanced quality and customer experience, improved consistency and reliability. It’s also an opportunity for internal teams to learn and benefit from performance data and process and training lessons learned.

Transform the high risk of digital conversions into high returns with Vericast. We provide skilled resources, proven best practices and expert contact center support to ensure a smooth transition experience for your financial institution and its customers.

Learn more about how to turn your contact center into a customer satisfaction center.