As Bankers, the past few years have been a test of endurance in terms of customer loyalty and trust.The introduction of social and mobile channels has increased the need for greater transparency and consistency of service. Apart from this, Branch rationalization, the impetus of improving customer experience and increasing share of wallet are just some of the challenges and opportunities facing the financial sector today.

To counter such challenges, leading companies are discovering the strategic business value of comprehensive approaches to proactive customer contact. They are leveraging customer and product information from across the enterprise to reach out to their customers with personalized service messages and sales offers to cement and grow profitable relationships. For most leading-edge companies, these initiatives are an integral part of their unified communications visions and strategies.

Contact Centers have become important corporate assets. In addition to handlng inbound calls, there is a growing need for customer service organizations to proactively communicate with customers.Today’s next-generation notification systems can automate those communications that previously could only be complrted by a live service agent. Many mission-critical business processes—such as customer deliveries, appointment scheduling, and bill payments—are efficiently handled by advanced outbound IVR systems, delivering cost savings to the enterprise and convenience to customers.

However, not all customers are created equal—from the heavy spender who asks little of customer service to the time waster who calls daily to challenge fees and generally costs a company money — each type of customer brings his or her own set of characteristics to every interaction. The trick is having a full picture of those characteristics so that interactions can be personalized for that customer.Most companies aren’t close to achieving this. They provide insufficient service to their most valuable customers, and expend excessive sales energy on the customers who don’t warrant it. Yet, effectively linking customer service and sales efforts to the true value of customers improves the customer experience, increases sales and loyalty, and leads to more effective use of sales and service resources.

The need of the hour is to bring together the totality of a customer’s interactions across all channels to create a repository of customer data and context. The final objective should be to enable an organization to segment its customer base in order to ensure personalized customer service delivery and sales outreach activities that extract maximum value.