Home Is Where the Work Is For Financial Services Industry

2020 saw a massive shift to homeworking almost overnight; a shift that looks set to become the norm for many businesses, at least for some of the time. In the UK, Nationwide recently announced that it will allow all 13,000 of its office staff to work remotely permanently when restrictions are eased, with other organizations set to announce similar plans.

For financial services contact center operatives and call handlers in particular, this move to homeworking, once considered impossible, is now increasingly commonplace. But what does this mean for employees and employers? What do financial services organizations need to put in place to ensure the efficiency and success of this as a long-term and, most importantly, workable business model? Ultimately, it’s not where you work but how you work that will make all the difference. And if working from home is to be a suitable alternative to a traditional office-based workforce, there are a number of considerations to be taken into account. Let’s take a look at a few of them and how implementing the right complaint management system can help.

Empower Remote Workers With Cloud Systems

Systems are, of course, key, giving employees access to the right tools and solutions to do their job from home. In this respect, SaaS has come into its own over the past year, with the flexible, scalable nature of SaaS deployments making them a versatile choice. Indeed, at the start of the pandemic, it was those businesses which had already made the move to the cloud that were best placed to rapidly adapt to a homeworking model.

Users can access systems wherever they have an internet connection, with browser-based solutions accessible on mobile devices or home laptops and PCs. Cloud security is no longer the concern it once was, enabling geographically dispersed teams to access secure data and business systems from home. And, advanced disaster recovery (DR) and back-up capabilities as standard mitigate any risk further still, with a SaaS deployment providing the robust, secure framework that effective homeworking needs. Read further to discover Aptean's cloud-based software solutions.

Provide Support and Intelligence for Frontline Staff

Face-to-face peer and supervisory support can be difficult to replicate in a homeworking environment. The right complaint management systems feature intelligent workflows, streamlining the core procedures that lie at the heart of every customer interaction and helping steer the next steps for your employees to take, avoiding unnecessary and often time-consuming escalations or interventions. This provides a level of guidance that can even surpass face-to-face support. These types of tools are invaluable for homeworking, particularly where your frontline staff may lack the skills and experience to manage more complex situations; situations which would have traditionally been passed to a supervisor.

Set Guardrails to Ensure Quality as Standard

In a similar vein, in-built quality assurance (QA) processes are vital. Putting the necessary checks and balances in place not only helps to boost customer satisfaction, but identifies staff training and development needs too. By providing an accurate, real-time view of staff performance, your supervisors can pinpoint where teams and individuals can improve. This helps to flag errors and allows your business to judge whether employees have the right tools to access the information they need in the most intuitive format at the right time.

Such measures can be crucial in onboarding new starters too - an exceptionally tricky task to carry out from afar. For new employees, 100% of their work might be reviewed within a QA framework but as their work improves and the quality increases, the QA process begins to step away, becoming less intrusive as employee ability and confidence in employees increases.

Use Customer Feedback to Drive Continuous Improvement

Customer feedback is also a useful tool for developing a successful homeworking model. In combination with a robust QA framework, customer feedback can drive real improvements across your business; not only in terms of customer interactions, but for products, services and processes as well. With the right complaints management system in place, it’s possible to create and maintain surveys, allowing case data and in-context survey data to sit side-by-side—ensuring the direct correlation of information in near real time. This timely, in-context feedback can inform and drive improvements, underpinning your continuous improvement strategy and informing best practice.

As many of us await a return to a pre-pandemic normality to see what's next for Financial Services, the shift to homeworking could very well be one change that stays with us for the long-term, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. With the right complaint management tool, deployed in the right way, underpinned by a rigorous system of checks and feedback, the move to a homeworking model could prove to be the most effective strategy for your business.

So, do you want to support a homeworking model while cultivating a more effective, productive workforce? Then you need the right complaints management system to deliver continuous business improvements and ensure a real difference to the bottom line.

For more information on how our complaints management system, Aptean Respond, can support your homeworking plans and much more, contact us today.