Guest Column: Prosonjit Basu, Chief Strategy Officer, Home Credit India pens down new-age trends brands could use to enhance customer engagement in today's day and age
Customer retention and acquisition of new customers today has become fiercely competitive for NBFC’s. Hence this necessitated a people-first approach through stable, long-term, omnichannel strategies for effective customer relationship management. These tactics manifest the customer support team’s success in retaining customers for long.
The changing times that we are living in has prompted innovative strategies to meet new customer demands and expectations. While COVID-19 has mostly placed roadblocks before businesses, it has also created opportunities for innovation. The penetration of the internet and usage of smartphones has enabled NBFCs to connect with even low-income customers digitally. Robotic process automation (RPA) has enabled streamlining of operational workflows, enhanced productivity leading to cost efficiencies as well.
The development of an analytics-driven culture to narrow down potential target customers is becoming the norm among NBFCs and Fintechs.
Advancing Customer Experience through innovative techniques
To improve the client experience in the NBFC sector, strategies must be reformed across the board, from distribution to product, legal, risk and pricing. The new-age customers want simplicity, personalization, flexibility, and guidance at every stage of their borrowing journey.
It is observed that Intelligent and instant responses are imperative for the NBFC industry as personalized engagement can help in developing an emotional connect with customers. To address customers evolving needs, an omnichannel approach is pertinent as the customer might not appreciate repeating the query. Scalability and capacity could become prospective hurdles when it comes to handling voluminous customer queries, hence call centre automation and self-service helpdesk could provide the right resolution.
Recommending a Relevant Product Portfolio
As consumer behaviour and demands are evolving, NBFCs are also taking a closer look at their existing product offerings to see if they are relevant to the consumer’s evolving needs. This entails being proactive in terms of tweaking, adapting, replacing, or even dropping certain offerings.
With these changing times, NBFC’s are offering products and services that are helping individuals grow both economically and socially. They are working towards offering relevant insurance products and healthcare products along with their core lending products to cater to a wider range of customer needs. These initiatives will go a long way in offering a great proposition to existing customers and help acquire a new customer base.
Other interesting formats that NBFC’s are introducing for their customers are loyalty and reward programs. Strong loyalty programs have become pivotal to retaining customers. These programs are developed using customer data to understand their spending pattern, in collaboration with e-commerce/ gaming/ travel and hospitality portals. Such programs lead to seamless revenue generation as well as please the customers.
Technology – Key Imperative for Growth
Technology is a great enabler for spearheading the growth of the NBFC sector in India and also a key driver for financial inclusion. Technology has aided NBFC firms to introduce new services and products with greater agility. Today, NBFC’s majorly focus on innovating customer-centric smart technologies such as chatbots, artificial intelligence that has opened an entirely new stream of audiences who can today strike a better connect with their lender. AI integration with CRM is the most prominent advancement that is poised to impact the industry in a big way.
In today’s contemporary world, digital transformation has accelerated several hard metrics of service and customer relationships. Strategic approaches towards customer happiness can transform into business currency in the long term.
Customer Satisfaction is the KEY
Globally, customers have responded positively to companies that maintain great levels of customer service. It builds an unwavering foundation towards customer retention. Since customers are the brand’s strongest and the most powerful ambassadors, ranking high on customer satisfaction goes a long way to attract and retain them. Customer retention in NBFCs depends on fine-tuning internal and external procedures, delivering a high-quality end-to-end customer experience, having metrics to gauge customer happiness, and finding a few differentiating factors that can set a benchmark for an elevated customer experience.
