Aimee Norigian was recently named vice president and call center manager at BankNewport. She has more than two decades of experience in banking, including five years with BankNewport, where she began as an assistant call manager. She attended the Community College of Rhode Island.
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NORIGIAN: I’m responsible for overseeing BankNewport’s call center to ensure that our customers receive quality service.
At BankNewport, we pride ourselves on offering many different ways for our customers to do their banking – our team responds to the inbound calls for everyday banking, digital banking troubleshooting, emails, our chat systems and our virtual tellers who assist our customers through the personal teller machines.
PBN: What are your top three priorities for the next year in your new role?
NORIGIAN: To continue expanding and digitizing the solutions that we currently offer in an effort to make banking easier and more convenient for our customers and to streamline processes for the BankNewport team.
To further expand our already robust customer experience by adapting to a new customer-relationship management tool that the bank plans to roll out in 2021. This will help us track our customers’ entire service experience from beginning to end.
To support the rollout of more PTM machines. We currently have 16 PTMs and hope to have 22 by the end of this year. Our [PTMs] … were a convenient tool for customers during the pandemic, allowing them to continue to cash checks, make withdrawals and deposits, while our branches were operating by appointment only.
PBN: How has the pandemic changed call center operations in terms of taking inquiries and service support to customers? Do you expect those changes will have long-term impacts on the operations?
NORIGIAN: During the pandemic, supporting our customers digitally and remotely became a critical component to the bank’s day-to-day operations. Our team fielded many important questions from customers about how to handle their finances – especially related to the crisis – and with limited employees and hours at our branches, the call center was able to ease their minds and provide the solutions they needed.
Our call center also helped many customers navigate online banking for the first time, which allowed them to complete the transactions they needed to, even when they couldn’t see their banker in person.
I do expect that the operational efforts we’ve undertaken during the pandemic are here to stay, as many customers have adapted to new ways of banking and like the convenience that we’re able to provide them.
PBN: Virtual banking is also a service of the call center. Did demand for this rise during the pandemic? How much will this be a regular part of banking services in the future?
NORIGIAN: During the pandemic, the demand for virtual banking rose significantly, and our call center continues to be equipped to handle those services.
In fact, our PTM agents, who reside in the call center, serviced 21,000 video transactions with customers in 2020, which was three times the number completed in 2019.
The pandemic necessitated the adoption of our variety of digital banking tools, and now that customers are comfortable banking this way, we expect usage to increase across all lines of business.
PBN: How has the rise of online and mobile banking during COVID-19 increased or changed the role of the call center in serving customers? How do call center services complement in-branch offerings?
NORIGIAN: With the rise of online and mobile banking, our call center associates are trained to educate customers on how to properly navigate the virtual banking tools that we offer. We teach our customers about everything from mobile deposits to opening accounts and restricting their own debit cards, and much more. This has really helped our customers better understand how to make the most of their online or mobile banking experience, and based on the feedback that we’ve received, many customers plan to continue using these features going forward.
These virtual offerings are a wonderful complement to our branches’ in-person offerings. While our Universal Bankers are happy to assist with any question a customer has, they are also trained and have the experience to facilitate a broader variety of, and more complicated, transitions, from deposits and withdrawals to loan applications.
Nancy Lavin is a PBN staff writer. Contact her at Lavin@PBN.com.
