The bank's 'Less BS' campaign brings a little humour to the serious subject of finances and its bid to shrink its part in customers' lives with simpler interactions
Bankwest's latest campaign and digital innovations are about differentiating from bigger banks trying to take too big a role in customers' lives and highlighting the group's work to simplify banking and interaction, the company says.
The latest campaign uses the tagline 'Bank less, less BS' to highlight the diminishing role Bankwest is striving to take in customers' lives and how the bank is working to simplify banking and interactions for its customers with seamless interactions across all channels. And a key way it's supporting this is by adopting in-app messaging. Bankwest launched in-app messaging last year and told CMO on average it now receives 1,000 messages per day, which represents 10 per cent of call volumes.
“Our customers’ needs are changing incredibly quickly and, as a result, we’re working to continually evolve and improve the digital services and products we offer in response to how our customers are telling us they want to interact with us,” Bankwest digital contact centre consultant, Peter Warnock, told CMO.
Bankwest said 82 per cent of in-app queries are closed at first point and 72.5 per cent of users are returning to the app, helping customers move away from online banking to mobile-oriented interactions.
In line with this, the bank has seen a significant rise in engagement levels on digital channels over the past three years, and in particular, an increase of 88 per cent mobile in-app logins. This has seen the group change how customers contact the bank to maximise convenience. Warnock explained Bankwest wanted to offer “seamless and frictionless” customer contact and its new in-app, cross-platform messaging facility complements this multi-channel customer support approach.
The bank has adopted LivePerson’s CX platform to help power its in-app messaging service and digital CX staff, which typically come from frontline phone teams. It's also using LivePerson's Live Engage platform to deal with queries across multiple digital channels.
“Regardless of the manner in which they choose to interact with us, the service experience should be the same," Warnock said. "What does make it different is the convenience of in-app messaging or using social media to contact your bank. There’s no waiting on hold, no navigating a recorded menu system or jumping through identification hoops. Customers simply send their enquiry to us and come back to read the response at their leisure.”
Bankwest's harnessing of in-app messaging reflects a new era in conversational commerce driven by consumers, LivePerson APAC general manager, Andrew Cannington, told CMO. And the next frontier is
the growth of voice search through digital assistants like the Google Home and Amazon Echo along with Siri and Google now on phones and tablets.
“Consumers want to communicate with brands like they do with friends and family. This might be asking an airline questions about a flight via SMS or rich shopping experiences in WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger,” Cannington explained.
And with more and more artificial intelligence (AI) coming into the mix, Cannington expected CX to further automate and transform, allowing brands to respond to lower level interactions at scale, and allowing humans to focus on complex interactions and communicating value in product and service offerings.
However to get there, he advised businesses must change the perception of the contact centre from an expensive operation to an extension of the marketing operation.
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