Activity Timeline: your key to seamless customer service

Meet Ella Vate, a frontline customer service representative at Unity Bank. On a particularly hectic Tuesday morning, she picks up the phone to hear the concerned voice of Mr. Bill Savings. He’s anxious because his payment hasn’t gone through, and, as always, trying her best to help the customer, Ella finds herself navigating a maze of fragmented systems and multiple logins. With each click, she plunges deeper into outdated notes and unclear data, leaving Mr. Savings frustrated and repeating himself.

As she struggles to find the right information, Ella daydreams of a tool that could streamline her workflow — a single view where she could see customer interactions, payment statuses, and relevant notes. This kind of solution would enable her to provide Mr. Savings with instant clarity and efficiency, reducing the chaos of endless searching and improving the overall customer experience.

Like Ella Vate, your bank’s frontline employees often face overwhelming challenges. According to Talkdesk, average hold times have increased by 7% in 2023, to 16.9 seconds. Additionally, 76% of customer support agents report feeling overwhelmed by the numerous systems they must navigate to assist customers effectively.

The volume of data that your employees need to manage is also growing rapidly. Unfortunately, poor data quality further negatively impacts operations, leading to lost sales opportunities, and straining customer relationships (Experian).

This complexity hampers frontline agents’ ability to resolve problems quickly and build strong relationships with customers. As a result, your employees often struggle to piece together previous interactions and account histories, sifting through multiple systems just to answer a single question. This makes it difficult for them to identify root causes of customer problems and understand their motivations, let alone spot potential opportunities. What is needed is a faster and easier way to understand their customers' activity history — a critical step in the customer service journey.

Enter Activity Timeline.

The Backbase Engagement Banking Platform covers end-to-end banking journeys for Retail, Business, and Wealth. Our Activity Timeline consolidates all events across the entire platform into a single, user-friendly interface, in real time, enabling employees to grasp the complete picture at a glance.

Imagine a timeline that displays all key events — whether initiated by the customer, an employee, or the system — providing just the right amount of information to help frontline agents quickly grasp the situation. This intelligent linking of events allows your team to connect the dots and filter through data efficiently, addressing issues and understanding motivations without making customers repeat themselves.

Features include:

• Customer history timeline: access a chronological list of all relevant customer actions — login, notifications, payments, and more — all in one place. 
• Smart event filters: with smart filters, you can quickly find specific events, the accompanying text can be customized to fit your bank’s unique context.
• Event detail overview: dive into granular event details that provide in-depth insights, enabling service reps to better assist each customer.
• Related events: link related events to create a cohesive narrative and reduce the time spent sifting through data while enhancing accuracy.
• Event customization toolkit: tailor events, add your own, and configure descriptions and titles to integrate your bank's specific language and context.

The Activity Timeline boosts the Human Assist Services, revolutionizing how frontline service agents interact with customer data. The new capability takes the customer 360° view and unified employee workspace experience to the next level, summarizing a wide variety of information usually found in multiple systems into one simple and easy-to-understand view. A holistic view of each customer’s journey empowers your frontline employees to quickly navigate customers’ activity histories and deliver exceptional, personalized service.

Who is it for? The capability to various personas within the bank, providing targeted benefits:

• For frontline service employees: better visibility helps customer service reps quickly identify the root causes of issues, leading to faster resolutions and happier customers.
• For relationship-focused employees: relationship managers can use the timeline events to understand customer journeys. This knowledge allows them to personalize their services, building stronger connections and increasing loyalty.
• For specialist roles (fraud officers/risk analysts): your team gains valuable insights into user banking activity, including details about actors, devices, and login info. This helps them spot potential fraud quickly and keep accounts secure.

The ability to access a comprehensive chronological view of the customer in one centralized system eliminates the inefficiencies that arise from navigating multiple systems. This unified view allows agents to quickly diagnose and address customer issues, improving service quality and satisfaction. Let’s look at the overall benefits:

• Reduced data lookup time: searching through various systems can be frustrating. By bringing relevant data into one view, your employees spend less time looking for information and can focus more on helping customers.
• Improved customer interactions: linking related events into a clear story is a game changer. For instance, tracking a payment journey makes it much easier for agents to understand customer interactions, saving time and improving service accuracy.
• Understand external communications: view bank’s external communications and strengthen the marketing messages to ensure customers understand what the bank can offer them.
• Brand-aligned communication: you can easily customize event titles and descriptions to use your brand’s language, ensuring a more consistent experience for employees.
• Reduced information gaps: you can add or remove events to capture all relevant information in one place, even if they’re outside the Backbase system.
• Proactive fraud detection: your team can quickly spot key events and suspicious activities, like potential account takeovers, improving security and allowing for faster action to protect customers.

The implementation of the Activity Timeline is not just a technological upgrade; it’s a cultural shift towards better customer service. Equipping frontline employees with the right tools will allow you to create a seamless experience that not only satisfies customers but also empowers your team.