The era of hybrid working has begun, and it offers an opportunity for the financial services sector to level-up the way they work.
With only 20% of financial services professionals agreeing that the typical employee needs to be in the office three days or more per week, there’s growing demand for flexibility in working practices. Meanwhile, 70% of financial services employers believe staff should be coming into the office at least three days per week. This gulf in expectations between employers and their teams is a challenge for management but one thing is clear – some balance of hybrid working is the new normal for financial services.
With hybrid working comes some challenges, a common one is how to keep teams connected from anywhere and blend office-based and remote working practices for smoother, more secure communications and file management. According to KPMG’s report, some of the top challenges to hybrid and remote working are establishing processes and support (21%), employee tracking and technology (18%) and communication (10%).
Communication, collaboration and consistency
Establishing and maintaining consistency in communication and collaborative tools both in and out of the office is essential to a successful hybrid working set-up. Microsoft Teams is more than just a chat tool, offering everything you need to keep remote collaboration smooth and consistent from anywhere.
The basic, out-of-the-box features Teams brings to your workflow are instant chats, video meetings, file collaboration, and department channels to keep everything organised. Set up channels for specific priorities within your department to keep everything you need filed in the same place for easy access, updates and discussions. Check in and chat with colleagues in the main channel feed and add Planner to the mix to assign tasks and manage deadlines.
However, Teams’ capabilities don’t end there. With the support of our Modern Communications experts, you can add Teams-powered desk phones, teams meeting rooms and even Teams-enabled contact centres to unify your communications under the Teams umbrella. Not only does this simplify your processes and consolidate your software stack, but unified communications also bring the security and compliance features of Microsoft Teams to all you do.
The future of communications in financial services
The financial services sector is more competitive than ever, with customer experience making or breaking organisations from the most tight knit of investment firms to the biggest of banks. In the era of up-and-coming FinTech businesses setting the pace for customer expectations, it’s never been more important to get it right.
Great customer communications start with great internal communications. The right tools allow your teams to do what they do best with the insights you need to go above and beyond. Without them, your communications are at risk of becoming disjointed, slow, and failing to meet evolving customer demands.
Teams-powered desk phones and meeting rooms allow your teams to communicate and collaborate smoothly, as well as make in and out-bound calls all from one place. By keeping these communications centralised, management can oversee call volumes and activity to adjust for the best possible performance as needed. Plus, you can rest assured your communications and any associated files both internally and externally are secure and compliant.
If your team is managing large volumes of in-bound calls, a modern contact centre is essential. The days of landline-based call centres have passed, with modern cloud-native solutions offering next generation performance and insights. Not only do Teams-based contact centres consolidate your licenses by bringing your communications under your Microsoft technology stack, but they also allow you to access vital analytics and act on them as needed. Create dashboards with call volumes, wait times and other insights so you can see how your contact centre is performing on a single pane of glass.
What’s the next step?
Implementing these solutions is easy and hassle-free, with our Modern Communications managed services. We work in partnership with Anywhere365 to deliver the Teams-powered tools financial services organisations need to enable modern communications methods.
Get started on your modern communications journey and find out all your need to know with advice tailored to your need with a free expert consultation.
