Building Two-Way Trust for Financial Services with Branded Call Display (BCD)

by Jonjie Sena

For customer interactions in high-risk sectors like finance, trust and security go hand-in-hand. The personal, high-touch nature of the phone when communicating with customers provides a way to improve engagement—and protect and promote your brand. But in a recent OMDIA survey, 67 percent of finance firms said their customers’ call experience was not currently in alignment with, or the same quality as, their digital experience. Due to robocalls, and scams, customers aren't answering the phone.

In our Meet the Expert Series, we turned to Neustar Vice President of Identity and Trust Solutions, Adam Russell, for insights on how financial service firms can restore trust with customers.

Adam works with the largest banks, financial services firms, insurance, and wealth management companies to help them interact with their customers more effectively and efficiently across the voice channel. As these enterprises deal with fraud, collections, and a variety of customer service challenges, new solutions like Branded Call Display (BCD) are needed to reassure customers about who's really calling, and ensure secure, trusted voice connections. 

How important is the phone channel in the finance space?

The phone channel's really important. Think about how you work with your bank. If you have a problem, you want to call in and talk to a person. So it's extremely important for servicing as well as for alerting and identity verification. All of us have dealt with getting a text from a bank or another institution as a multi-factor way of proving that we are who we say we are, so they can protect us and our accounts.

For the enterprise, especially banks who are dealing with your money, your retirement savings or your insurance policies, it’s incredibly important that they too prove their identity so you know you should answer their call. Banks need to overcome the spam tagging, the call blocking, and the unknown caller syndrome that is plaguing everybody. 

Using the phone channel to build trust is really tricky because inherently we've all been trained not to trust the phone calls anymore. Our skepticism is unfortunate for the enterprise, because the clients that I work with are calling for very valid reasons. They're insurance companies calling to follow up on a claim to help out their policy holders. It's a bank trying to verify an identity or alert to fraud that could be happening on an account to protect the consumer. It's a pharmacy that's calling a patient to remind them to pick up a refill. These things are all very legitimate purposes for calling. And unfortunately, a lot of those go unanswered.

Why is it important to rebuild trust in the financial services industry?

It's incredibly important for enterprises, especially banks and other financial services companies, to build trust because they're dealing with such important interactions with their consumers. Let's face it. We've all been subject to robo-dialing and fraud calls and spam. We're all inherently skeptical of any call that comes in. So the biggest challenge is overcoming that skepticism. 

In financial services, they need to really have that two-way interaction with the consumer so that both sides can trust who they're talking to because the downside, the impact of that breaking down, can be catastrophic at times. So it's absolutely essential in financial services, as well as other high-risk industries like healthcare, to ensure multi-factor authentication and verification to restore trust in the voice channel. That’s what Neustar, a TransUnion company, brings.

How does Neustar help the finance industry improve outbound call answer rates? 

Most of our efforts with financial services clients have really centered around four elements of the outbound dialing channel, including: 

1. Call blocking, spam tagging removal, registration of numbers, and ultimately getting financial services companies' names and information  to show up properly on the phones. That's the first step that really helps to get customers to answer the phone. 
2. The authentication of the call itself: so that when the consumer sees a call coming in, they can trust that the call has been vetted by the carriers and that the caller is who they say they are. 
3. The analytics and intelligence to help them optimize when they dial and how frequently, which phone number to use, what time of day, what day of week is going to be most convenient for consumers so that they can really strive to get the majority of their dials answered the first time around.
4. Layering on the proper branding with solutions like Branded Call Display (BCD) to make sure calls show up the right way, with  logo, reason for calling, and other dynamic content.

These are the milestones in building trust in the outbound channel. Neustar Trusted Call Solutions (TCS) address these challenges head on, with easy integration into your call centers.

Why is call authentication important and how does it work?

One of the newer capabilities that's come out this year is the ability to truly authenticate calls on an outbound basis. The whole premise is to help consumers trust the call that's coming through. 

If the first step in building trust in outbound dialing is getting your caller naming correct and avoiding spam tagging, the next step is moving through the authentication process. Customers will be able to look to their phones as their authentication vehicle. In many cases, they will see that token show up with a blue check mark, much like social media platforms, and they’ll know they can really trust who’s calling.

Authentication will become one of the most important components of solidifying the trust in any calls that are coming through. It will hopefully will reduce a significant amount of the robo dialing that's going on. 

While the evolution and adoption of authentication in the phone channel is going to take some time, it’s important to take action now and work with an organization like Neustar that can actually facilitate that start-to-finish authentication loop. 

How does Branded Call Display (BCD) change the game? 

This past year overall has been an exciting time at Neustar, embarking with our clients on this journey of rebuilding trust in the phone channel. We've performed dozens of client pilots and analyses across different use cases in different industries. What we've consistently found is that the Branded Call Display solution moves the needle materially for all of them. 

Answer rates improve when consumers know who’s calling and why. They want to engage. Because you were able to identify who you were and build trust in that interaction, you're able to get that conversion event that you're looking for much, much more effectively. 

This is one of those rare instances where everybody—operations and compliance, risk and fraud, consumers—all want the same thing: that one interaction that matters. The consumer picks up, they have the conversation, and everyone moves on. It really has been an exciting time as we've worked with our clients to find different ways to help improve their engagement, their operations, and their customer experience through our branded call solutions.

What’s the bottom line for financial service firms? 

It's really important to reach your customers at the moments that matter for you and them. Since the phone channel has largely been compromised by spam callers and fraudsters, the key forward is to rebuild trust—whether you're a bank that's trying to reach out to customers for a payment reminder or a pharmacy trying to alert customers to pick up a prescription.

It’s Neustar’s mission to bring trust back.

Watch the video: Building Two-Way Trust for Financial Services, and learn more about Branded Call Display (BCD) and Caller Name Optimization (CNO) so you can improve answer rates, increase revenues, and protect your brand.