Fintechlab — Forecasting the Future with MKB’s Experts
Welcome to our newest series, where we ask leading experts from MKB Bank to share their predictions and insights about what the future might hold for the financial sector. Read through these short interviews to get a sneak peek about how they see tomorrow’s fintech world!
In the next part of the series, Albert Godena, Director of MKB Bank’s Contact Center shared his thoughts about the digitization of the Contact Center and the changes caused by the pandemic.
How does digitalization affect the life of MKB Bank’s Contact Center?
Both in the banking sector and within our bank, we have seen the entire banking market undergo a strong and rapid digitalization in the recent months. MKB Bank has been fully receptive to the need for digitization, we already have taken a lot of steps in this direction, but there is still work to be done.
Based on our statistics, the number of monthly incoming calls multiplied significantly and more customers than ever are using the services offered by the Contact Center as a way to maintain social distancing and avoid going into branches.
It sounds like it’s been an extremely busy period for you and your team. What steps are you taking to motivate customers to use MKB’s online services — thus relieving the Contact Center a bit?
During the initial lockdown, customers started using our digital services more frequently. These are mainly traditional, banking, non-personal service channels, such as our NetBANKár and mobile app. The pandemic has essentially forced this, but it did cause an uptake in usage of these channels.
However, after the first wave of the pandemic, when restrictions relaxed and customers were able to manage their finances in person again, we saw that branch banking turnover increased, NetBANKár and the use of mobile apps decreased. So, from this we can see that there are still customers who prefer to handle their financial matters in person, and they don’t easily make the switch to using online processes.
How else has digitalization in the banking sector benefited the Contact Center?
Digitization in general is a huge help and has been extremely useful for the Contact Center. In recent years, the cause of staff fluctuation has been that my collegues have faced a great deal of monotonous, repetitive work. To give a simple example, retrieving an account balance used to be a process that took hours. With the implementation of digital tools, time taken to complete these tasks will decrease substantially, freeing up time to work on much more complex and highly skilled issues. This has a positive impact on business operations as digitalisation has opened up a much broader perspective.
From the Contact Center’s point of view, what are the features that best support your work? And from the customer’s point of view, can we see that customers are also turning to the Contact Center because of the increase in complexity of banking processes?
From a customer’s perspective, we are clearly moving towards more complex tasks solved by the Contact Center and this also affects our structure. We have developed specialized groups within the Contact Center to address this.
This leads me to answer the first part of the question, that the Contact Center’s efficiency is possible by two things: one is moving password submissions to online interfaces, and the other is to simplify customer identification.
Previously, customers were identified by two-factor identification process — using PIN code and f.e. customer ID -,but now, this process can be easily managed through MKB ViedóBANK. This solution, for example, is also the result of a pandemic. These two features save us time and enhance the customers’ security simultaneously.
How is your team preparing for the second wave and what do you expect in the next phase of the pandemic?
We are still preparing for the second wave: We’ve started to support additional digital service processes, such as opening a securities account and SZÉP account via VideoBANK. The other important thing is the education of the customers, i.e. messages need to be sent to them that whenever they can, use the mobile app and take advantage of the opportunities offered by the online services. We expect a similar increase in Contact Center activity, but hopefully these additional measures will help us support our customers and give us time for continued improvements and integration of new digital tools. Our goal is to keep MKB at the forefront of digitalization while continuing to deliver a superior customer experience.
