How an Innovator in the Retirement Planning Industry Delivers an Outstanding Experience for Every Caller
Unless you’re actually in the industry, you probably have no idea how complicated retirement planning and administration can be.
If you’ve worked for a company with a retirement plan, you might not realize how many difficult questions they had to answer while setting up that plan—questions they knew could affect their business and your future. What options should our plan include? How do we execute the investments? Who will manage employee contributions? What solutions should we use for tax reporting?
Improving the retirement-planning process
For most businesses and financial advisors, developing retirement plans has always required working with several vendors and managing data across many different solutions. This has led to inefficiencies for plan administrators and confusion for individual account holders. That’s why FPS (Financial Processing Solutions) Group was founded—to develop streamlined technology solutions that help retirement professionals deliver better service to the customers they serve.
The company’s strategy worked. Turns out there was strong demand in the industry for comprehensive retirement planning solutions. But the more this technology-driven business brought on new customers, FPS became increasingly aware that they needed a state-of-the-art phone system provider.
When an outdated phone system does damage
Nearly all of the company’s customer interactions happen on the phone. And in an industry as competitive as retirement planning, FPS couldn’t afford to deliver anything less than an outstanding customer experience, every time. With its legacy phone system, that just was going to be a challenge.
The shortcoming of its previous phone system created challenges to providing high level customer service. When the team wanted to celebrate the addition of a new customer account, they instead had to deal with phone challenges that tempered the thrill of the moment.
“Bringing on a large customer triggers a lot of calls from employees asking about their new retirement plans,” explains IT Manager David Olson. “Our phone system didn’t let our staff efficiently field or transfer those calls. That left our agents overwhelmed and our new customers frustrated. Not the first impression we wanted to create.”
No visibility into customer service efficiency
Lack of efficient call routing was just one issues FPS faced with their phone system. The old phone system didn’t not have robust mechanisms for tracking and analyzing call data. That meant the support team had to spend too much time gathering important details like call volume, the average number of calls an agent could handle each day, and at what times of day or days of the week call traffic was likely to spike or decrease.
How do you create an outstanding experience for every caller?
When they rolled out RingCentral, FPS had the sophisticated tools their support agents needed to create an excellent experience for every caller. For example, RingCentral allowed the company to easily create phone tree menus that let callers route themselves to the right department or person quickly.
Also, RingCentral’s call queues allowed support agents to share the load of incoming calls more efficiently than ever. As David explains, these tools made all the difference for FPS—both in terms of improving the productivity and morale of the support staff and creating a better experience for customers.
Oh, and it improved business operations, too
Because RingCentral’s communications solution is cloud-based, meaning it enables calling from any internet-connected device, FPS’s team can now work remotely when they need to. Support agents can join call queues and take customer calls—even from home. As David points out, this can really help a company headquartered in a city like Denver.
“If there’s a weather issue here and coming into the office would be difficult or dangerous, our reps can use RingCentral’s softphone capability to handle work calls from their laptops.”
And FPS has found yet another benefit since deploying RingCentral: detailed call data reporting and analytics, which the team is using to gain insights and business intelligence that they’ve never had access to before. For example, the support department uses their RingCentral analytics portal to track and analyze call traffic, agent skill performance, and other important metrics.
“The support team is clearly finding ways to use this information to improve their operations,” David says, “because they’re generating and reviewing these reports every day.”