Effective Branch Appointments for Today’s Customer Experience

Banks are facing many questions as they reopen branches for full service and normalize branch operations. How do you ensure employee and customer safety? Comply with social distancing guidelines? And connect customers with impactful experiences in-branch?

New models are required to quickly deliver productive customer experiences while protecting both clients and employees. Banks must anticipate rapidly evolving clients’ needs and behavior shifts, and determine how to best deliver critical banking service accordingly. As branches reopen for face-to-face interactions, many banks are also reinventing service models to effectively offer pre-scheduled appointments and manage walk-ins.

Enable Customer Experiences with Appointment Booking

A customer-facing appointment scheduling application is key to maintaining social distancing. Banks without this capability are relying on call centers and other manual solutions to book and communicate customer appointments—inevitably, human error will result in confusion and disruption, hurting the client experience.

However, with an appointment booking application—available from your website or mobile app—customers can easily check for available appointment in real time. They choose the time, location, service, or service provider that works best for them, for either in-branch or virtual appointments.

Appointment levels can be intelligently set in the solution, based on the available staff, meeting space, and occupancy limits—with staggered increases as restrictions lift. This makes it simple to ensure that any appointments booked comply with social distancing guidelines.

Ensure Agile Appointment Scheduling

Of course, not all appointment booking solutions are created equal. During this period of disruption and rapid change, an agile mobile solution is necessary to provide real-time appointment visibility to both customers and employees. This enables you to consolidate all appointment touchpoints and improve the customer experience.

From an intuitive mobile app, you can:

• Securely communicate before appointments and follow up afterwards
• Check in arrivals, in compliance with social distancing guidelines
• Manage walk-ins and queues to reduce wait times

In this current dynamic environment, employee and customer availability is also subject to unexpected changes, which can lead to a poor service environment. By using an intelligent, mobile-first appointment solution—alongside a unified platform for branch workforce management and execution—this challenge can be alleviated. If customers update, reschedule, or cancel their appointments, these changes are automatically reflected in employee schedules and daily activities, in real-time. Similarly, if employees call out, their appointments are automatically reassigned to qualified alternates, so there’s no disruption when customers arrive at the branch.

Drive Long-Term Branch Experience Improvements

Beyond these immediate concerns, this unified approach to in-branch appointments can help you build a better branch customer experience moving forward. This approach enables you incorporate appointment data into branch forecasts and schedules. As a result, you can ensure branches are adequately staffed to accommodate appointments, walk-ins, and routine transactions—and account for prep time and post-meeting wrap up—times when staff might be available on paper, but not in practice.

Over time, the unified approach also helps retrain and redirect clients to pre-schedule appointments, as the customer experience is more efficient and productive. Not only does this ensure branch employees are prepared for their meetings, it can also encourage customers to visit at off-peak times, rather than getting stuck in long lines. This can proactively drive demand to your optimal branch hours, and offer an alternative to full branch staffing during night and weekend hours.

Need an appointment booking solution that’s quick to implement, but will still deliver post-crisis? Reflexis Appointments is the intelligent, quick-to-deploy, schedule-aware solution to get your branches back on track.