South African small business environment

As Winter slides into Spring, economic recovery is on the cards for South Africa, while environmental trouble continues to add strain to certain parts of the country.

South Africa out of recession

At the beginning of September, South Africa was declared free of technical recession, with the economy expanding by 2.5% in the second quarter of this year.

While this news is certainly cause for celebration, expectations should remain cautious: South Africa remains classified ‘junk status’ by ratings agencies, and economy instability remains a real threat.

Drought ravaged Western Cape suffers

The Western Cape continues to suffer through a record drought. With water restrictions continuing to tighten, some relief was had in the form of rains that nevertheless did not raise dams to needed levels.

This can be expected to have severe consequences, particularly for agriculture in the province.

Agriculture on the rise

In the rest of the country, the agriculture sector’s recovery was instrumental in pulling South Africa out of recession, along with finance and mining.

According to figures provided in Stats SA’s report, farmers are on track for a record-breaking maize crop at currently estimated levels.

This has the added effect of immediately reducing maize prices, providing relief for households across the country.

Global Investment Bank Modernizes Customer Engagement with the Verint Cloud

Global Investment Bank Modernizes Customer Engagement with the Verint Cloud

Verint just announced that a leading financial services company has selected Verint’s cloud customer engagement software to gain critical customer insights.

This multinational investment bank selected the Verint cloud to modernize its customer engagement operations and enable the bank to improve the customer experience through new insights, increased productivity, advanced forecasting and scheduling, and enhanced compliance. Other key benefits include reducing costs and meeting service levels more effectively.

Read more.

Focus on Fraud: How Financial Organizations Can Keep Up

While the financial environment faces a multitude of risks that evolve and change daily, none is more prominent and alarming than the threat of fraud. As criminals continue to become more sophisticated in their strategies and the risk paradigm becomes more complex, banks and credit unions stand to face significant loss if fraud is not controlled.

According to the 2017 American Bankers Association Deposit Account Fraud Survey, fraud against bank deposit accounts cost the industry approximately $2.2 billion in losses in 2016. And the threat landscape only continues to expand, as the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the cloud have propelled an increase in cyber threats and data breaches, with financial organizations becoming top targets.

Now more than ever, banks must become laser-focused on minimizing fraud attempts to protect customers, assets, and the brand. A change must first take place internally, where IT and physical security teams should converge to drive stronger alignment of resources and leadership. This level of collaboration is critical to ensure a comprehensive approach to fraud mitigation.

The next step involves recognizing the value of data and using this valuable tool in a proactive manner. Big data plays a key role in fraud reduction, helping financial organizations identify anomalies and vulnerabilities in real time. Leveraging information from multiple sources, systems, and sensors is critical for intelligence gathering, and can be done using innovative tools and methods that sort through data and determine relevance.

Intelligent technology solutions augment the ability to pinpoint security threats, helping banks alleviate risk and improve fraud investigations. Video surveillance is key to add an extra layer of observation to fraud efforts, and when integrated with analytics, management platforms, and transaction data, financial organizations can achieve enhanced situational awareness and heightened protection.

Banks and credit unions must take advantage of platforms that allow them to simplify, automate, and modernize their processes. Integrated applications, such as facial recognition and advanced identification via deep learning, can automatically pinpoint potential breaches and significant events and alert the appropriate personnel. This approach can be influential in fusing critical information that can be essential to close investigations.

It's no secret that the threat of fraud will likely always exist for financial institutions. Therefore, banks and credit unions must always stay one step ahead through partnerships, intelligent data collection, and advanced technology solutions.

To learn more, download the new “Looking to the Horizon: The Future of Risk in Banking” eBook.

Driving Business Outcomes with the Voice of the Customer

We recently hosted a webinar with Forrester’s Kate Leggett discussing how Voice of the Customer can maximize the value delivered by your contact center. And it starts by integrating this customer insight with operational data that you probably already capture.

The capability to do this at the individual call level provides extremely effective and precise diagnosis and action.

This is because it enables contact center leaders to better understand the issues that they have. Are they specific to their whole organization? Is there something consistent across a single team? Or is it just a single agent? Essentially, VoC provides the “why” behind the “what.” This operational data identifies trends, while VoC enables contact center leaders to see what is causing them.

Here are three important business outcomes highlighted in the Forrester webinar that VoC – combined with standard operational data – can help you move the needle on:

1. Customer Experience

Your contact center is at the very heart of your customer experience. It’s the first line of human defense in your capacity to resolve customer issues, help them achieve their objectives, drive desired behaviors and ultimately enhance revenue.

Marrying customer feedback with broader operational data provides a significantly improved customer understanding. Acting on this information and adjusting your strategy accordingly means you deliver a service more in line with their preferences. Specifically, you are much more likely to provide deeper engagement with each interaction while also becoming more personalized in your approach. The result: a significantly enhanced contact center customer experience.

1. Contact Center Performance

As a contact center leader, you most likely have a number of metrics that you monitor and seek to improve over time. Your VoC can help you improve performance on these key measures.

How? Again, this improved customer understanding provided by your VoC is critical. It’s this that enables you to detect and resolve issues quicker, while implementing process improvements that set you up for sustained success. Check out an ebook on this very topic if you’re interested in more on that.

1. Agent Performance

Tying detailed customer feedback to specific interactions helps you determine whether issues are related to a certain agent, team or location. Having this very precise information enables you to implement training and coaching strategies exactly where you need to drive improvements.

While this in turn allows you to turn the needle on key metrics like First Call Resolution and Average Handle Time, it also enables you to maximize agent retention rates.

Employees who are provided with the necessary training to do their jobs properly are far more likely to be engaged and fulfilled in their jobs. By contrast, those who are constantly unable to solve customer issues are much more likely to consider alternative opportunities.

These are just three key contact center improvements that can result from incorporating VoC into your strategy. Re-watch the webinar with Forrester’s Kate Leggett to learn more about the positive impact VoC can have on your contact center