Examining the “-ities”: Key Considerations When Evaluating Digital Customer Service Providers
Perhaps no industry is more dependent on reliable and secure digital service than Financial Services. Yet online outages and data breaches have become common occurrences, halting business with little to no warning. The challenge for financial institutions is to prepare for unforeseen disruptions—expect the unexpected.
There are strategies that financial institutions can take to mitigate downtime, improve reliability, boost security, and ensure scalability. Focus on your digital platforms, with special attention to customer-facing systems. From a reliability and security perspective, can your critical customer engagement platform help you manage through and even avoid downtime?
Reliability and Resiliency
It is imperative that you can serve your members and customers in a timely manner. Your mission-critical systems need to be iron-clad and deliver with reliable up-time. A properly designed Digital Customer Service (DCS) platform is just that—digital—and needs to be built to withstand shifting environment conditions such as network partitions and server failures, among others. As a cloud-based solution, it’s imperative that the platform be architected for high availability and scalability with fail-over built-in.
Not all platforms are created equal. Glia’s DCS platform is architected with mission-critical resiliency to address and avoid service interruptions caused by platform failures, software problems, human error, security breaches, and more, so our clients’ customer engagement operations remain up and running, even during major service outages.
Putting Security at the Core
Financial institutions are inordinately targeted for security attacks and have an extra layer of regulations to adhere to, so a secure platform is paramount. Digital Customer Service (DCS) enables companies to offer personalized communications where customers already are: online. As one of the “front doors” to your organization, mission critical security should be a core foundation of your DCS platform, not a feature! When you evaluate your digital communication options, ask your vendors about their security practices:
- Have their technology and processes been validated by leading financial enterprises?
- What certifications and audits have been conducted? Are SOC2 Type II certifications available? Do they have a GIAC GSEC certified security team?
- Do they provide end-to-end encryption as well as have a focus on masking personally identifiable information (PII) and data protections?
- What about scanning user-uploaded file attachments for viruses?
At Glia, security is at the core of our DCS products and infrastructure. Learn more about the three distinct layers of our security stack.
Solution Scalability
Offering a secure and seamless customer experience requires more than just point solutions. Creating a scalable platform that transitions from chat to voice to video for millions of interactions requires a strong infrastructure and solid testing plan. As you consider DCS platforms, ask your vendors:
- How is the solution architected? Can the system dynamically add capacity due to unexpected surges in usage?
- How many live customer deployments are active with all of the Digital Customer Service features today?
- How many years of full Digital Customer Service experience does the vendor have?
- What is the experience of the customer support team? Is there a dedicated 24/7 support infrastructure available?
Glia is built within a secure public cloud with multi-zone, multi-region, triple-hot architecture on a hardened AWS infrastructure. While it is extremely hard to build and expensive to run, Glia knows that shortcuts can’t be taken with your mission-critical systems.
Secure, Scalable, Reliable
When companies across North America were impacted by a recent partial AWS outage, our customers did not experience interruptions to their DCS interactions because every aspect of our product is tested for resilience, security and scalability. Whether we are evolving functionality or adding to our integrations with leading online banking and AI providers, our team is focused on providing a scalable, secure solution.
With Digital Customer Service (DCS) platforms like Glia, delivering a distinguished customer experience is within your reach. You can offer a seamless customer experience that is reliable, scalable and secure; if you choose the right platform. As you assess whether the solution fits your needs and offers security, scalability, and reliability, don’t be afraid to ask your vendors for a test drive of their solutions.
