Co-authored by Chris Berry (Managing Director, Liquid Voice)
In today’s ever-evolving economic landscape, regional and community banks are facing challenges that demand strategic downsizing to combat hefty profit declines. RingCentral and Liquid Voice have partnered to bring together the combination of workforce productivity enhancements and cost-cutting business transformation to facilitate a path forward for banks to continue providing superior customer experience (CX).
With RingCentral and Liquid Voice, banks will be able to migrate their communications to a next-gen customer experience platform, retire legacy data centers and archival systems, all whilestreamlining operations and improving interaction data visibility.
The Obvious Cost-cutting Measures
As banks grapple with the need for contraction, certain areas emerge as prime targets for expense management. These include trimming workforces, reducing real estate expenses, optimizing infrastructure spend, and rationalizing software and maintenance costs. The rationale behind these measures is to enhance the bank’s financial health while preserving service quality.
Real-Estate Rationalization: Many banks have successfully curtailed real-estate holdings by closing or consolidating branches and embracing remote work solutions, and online banking.
Infrastructure Efficiency: Cutting down on infrastructure costs by adopting more efficient technologies can be a game-changer.
Unconventional Strategies for Maintaining Customer Experience 
While cost-cutting measures are necessary, a fine balance is required to safeguard CX. Let’s explore the less obvious yet equally vital considerations when downsizing, such as reducing workforce and local branch presence, all while preserving a superior CX.
Banks need to maintain an excellent CX as one of the leading drivers for growth in banks is referrals between family and friends. Money and finance are difficult subjects to navigate, so high-quality and efficient customer care cannot be forgotten. A great customer experience keeps existing customers happy and loyal, while also increasing the chance of them referring their family and friends. It often results in increased customer lifetime value, as loyal customers are more likely to use a bank’s services and products, such as loans and credit cards over extended periods.
Workforce Restructuring: Balancing downsizing with customer service is a delicate task. Modern solutions such as omnichannel customer service, AI-based workforce management, and AI agent assistance have helped banks streamline their operations while retaining high levels of customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Self-Service Revolution: Leveraging AI technology can be a game-changer in maintaining CX during downsizing. It leverages intelligent virtual agents to address common questions and solve simple tasks, offers customer service staff more coaching and support for their day-to-day interactions, and ultimately improves CSAT and chances of first-time resolution.
The Role of Flexible Licensing and Cloud-Based Deployments
Flexibility is key to executing a successful downsizing strategy. Flexible licensing models and cloud-based deployments empower banks to reduce costs as infrastructure is retired or altered.
Streamlined Operations: Banks have streamlined their operations over the past decade by adopting cloud-based customer management systems. These systems can be deployed flexibly and rapidly, but also realize the benefits of reduced costs and enhanced customer response times.
CX Enhancement: Banks embracing cloud-based solutions and AI can harness data analytics and customer insights, enabling them to tailor services and anticipate customer needs, thus improving CX. With bigger data, the opportunity to analyze trends and forecast staffing arises.
Modernized Engagement: Unifying all communication channels into a single communications platform also improves the way customers can interact with the bank while giving each customer service personnel a single pane of glass to better service the customer.
Leveraging Experience: Liquid Voice and RingCentral
Enter two seasoned allies, RingCentral and Liquid Voice, offering our expertise in assisting banks with efficiency strategies. Our experience in retiring data centers and legacy systems to transformationally enhance how businesses operate has also enhanced CX and compliance.
RingCentral’s Success: RingCentral provides a suite of CX solutions to help businesses of any size serve their customers better, whether their needs are simple or complex. In general, financial institutions when using RingCentral technology have on average seen ROIs in excess of 27%. Many more have benefited from call containment or reduced technology spending, attaining investment payback within 12 months or less.
Liquid Voice’s Expertise: Liquid Voice has helped numerous retail and investment banks retire their legacy voice and interaction recording systems – reducing maintenance costs and closing data centers that would be difficult to retire due to the need to maintain recording equipment with a large server footprint – all while improving interaction data retrieval via consolidation of all interaction history into a single pane of glass which:
🔎 Enables easy search and retrieval of any customer interaction regardless of age, format, or platform
💬 Consolidates all previous interactions and supporting data into a ‘single source of truth’
📊 Enables deep analysis of immediate issues as well as long-term operational trends
Centralized Interaction Data Repository For True Customer Understanding
The real magic of Liquid Voice and RingCentral lies in their ability to consolidate customer data into a centralized, easy-to-deploy repository. This repository is not just a repository; it is a dynamic tool capable of monitoring and automatically flagging areas of dissatisfaction and improvement. These features are invaluable for staff training and CX enhancement, and vital as banks downsize due to likely increased call volumes from vulnerable customers that would usually opt for an in-branch interaction.
Improved Monitoring and Flagging: Liquid Voice and RingCentral enable banks to monitor customer interactions, automatically flagging areas of dissatisfaction.
CX Enhancement and Compliance: By identifying areas for improvement and ensuring swift responses, these tools contribute to an overall enhanced CX and assist banks in meeting rigorous compliance demands.
Yes, downsizing is a strategic imperative for regional banks as the world moves to digital-only. But that doesn’t mean CX should take a backseat. A superior CX is still possible providing agile systems and data understanding are implemented. By forming partnerships with industry leaders like Liquid Voice and RingCentral, banks can navigate these challenges, emerge stronger, and thrive in an industry that continues to change.
What are you waiting for? It’s time to work with the strongest partnership in the interaction recording and analytics space: RingCentral x Liquid Voice. Sign up for a consultation to hear more now.
Originally published Dec 11, 2023, updated Dec 13, 2023
