Matthew Marion, Senior Product Manager, UCaaS & CCaaS, at Windstream Enterprise

By Matthew Marion, Senior Product Manager, UCaaS & CCaaS, at Windstream Enterprise

Financial institutions operate in a world where the quality of the customer experience (CX) matters as much as the quality of a product or service itself, and customers are inclined to take their business elsewhere if interactions with their bank aren’t consistently rich, seamless across channels, and ultimately fruitful in their outcome.

It’s no surprise, then, that CX is also a strong predictor of a financial institution’s overall success. Research from McKinsey, for example, indicates that banks that excel at customer satisfaction also excel in areas like total shareholder return, increased growth, and decreased costs. What’s more, McKinsey found a positive correlation between customer satisfaction and greater wallet share, as “customers who are satisfied with their banking experiences say they will purchase more of that bank’s products.”

Therein lies the challenge. To stand out from the competition, financial institutions must find new and creative ways to elevate their customer journeys across digital channels. That’s where the latest wave of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven capabilities can help, enabling banks to curate the highly personalized, on-point customer experiences that today’s consumers expect.

That’s not always a straightforward proposition for institutions that continue to rely upon outdated, manually driven systems and processes. Indeed, as banks close more brick-and-mortar branches and place greater emphasis on digital channels to serve customers, the first critical step in upgrading the customer experience happens at the contact center level, by moving away from older, poorly integrated legacy systems, to a fully integrated multichannel contact center platform with built-in AI. Usually these platforms are available in the cloud, in the form of a contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) offering.

The combination of CCaaS and AI can help financial organizations reinvent how they interact with customers — and provide other benefits along the way, such as enhanced productivity among customer service teams, reduced infrastructure and administration costs, and greater scalability based on the needs of the business. Let’s look at a handful of areas where intelligent CCaaS capabilities are enabling financial institutions to provide better customer service, faster:

1. Highly personalized interactions and support across channels. AI-powered chatbots and assistants that engage with customers from the start of an interaction can eliminate major customer pain points like long wait times, repetitive authentication processes and a lack of context from one channel to another. Instead, customers get natural conversations and interactions that seamlessly jump between text, voice, web, chat and email, without losing context. With predictive engagement capabilities, AI also can help hyper-personalize service, drawing from past clicks, preferences and order history to deliver recommendations during a virtual assistant or chatbot interaction, or to an agent during a conversation with a customer.
2. Better-informed agents = better customer outcomes. An AI-powered copilot can “listen” to customer-agent interactions in real time and guide agents toward effective issue resolution with best next action recommendations and resources to use during a conversation based on the context. AI also can be a highly effective gatekeeper, automatically and dynamically routing customer inquiries to the most appropriate agent or automated service, so customers don’t have to wait or bounce around, and instead land exactly where they need to be for the swiftest resolution of an issue. It also can identify more complex cases that require a higher human touch, routing them accordingly.

Here’s an area in which AI-powered sentiment analysis can also prove valuable by taking the temperature of an interaction (using the customer’s tonal nuances to identify sarcasm, for example), then suggesting best next actions to help an agent appease an unhappy customer. An AI copilot also can be trained to understand and use industry-specific terminology to give customers the impression they’re dealing with a subject-matter expert.

1. Automation to smooth and simplify the customer journey. By infusing intelligent, automated prompts, data-gathering and submission capabilities into customer-facing processes like loan servicing or collections deferment, the customer journey is not only smoother but less resource-intensive. AI virtual agents also can be used to accept and process customer orders without human intervention, and through integration with a customer relationship management system or a core banking system like FIS, Jack Henry or FISERV, provide details to the customer on exactly where their request, inquiry or order stands.
2. Intelligent capabilities empower customers with self-service options. Customers can get answers fast with the help of a virtual agent to provide in-the-moment support on account inquiries, transfers, card management, password management, travel notifications and other routine tasks.
3. Advanced fraud prevention and data protection to give customers peace of mind. As frequently as financial institutions are targeted by cyber criminals, it’s important that a CCaaS platform include security measures that meet elevated standards for protecting sensitive customer information and customer privacy. AI-driven capabilities can support advanced agent and customer authentication within a CCaaS platform, for example, to protect against both internal and external threats.
4. Analytics to support continuous CX improvement. The new wave of intelligent sentiment analysis and customer interaction analytics tools enable contact center managers to pull insights from all the customer-agent interactions that occur across channels, helping them identify high-level quality trends, as well as trends in customer queries, and issues with specific agents. Predictive capabilities also can spot emerging customer issues quicker and alert managers to address them proactively. What’s more, AI’s natural language processing capabilities can quickly review, summarize and analyze large volumes of recorded customer interactions, sparing contact center managers from what can be a hugely time-consuming process in evaluating agents.

McKinsey neatly summed up the business case for financial institutions to beef up their CX when it said, “Improving customer experience creates ‘stacked wins’ of higher returns, faster growth, and lower costs.” Those wins can add up quickly for institutions that understand how to harness the power of CCaaS and AI.

Author Bio:

Matthew Marion is Senior Product Manager, UCaaS & CCaaS, at Windstream Enterprise, where he is responsible for the Windstream Enterprise xCaaS product suite, including launch, development and lifecycle management, specializing in Contact Center as a Service. He joined Windstream in 2016 and has over 12 years of experience in the telecom industry managing a wide range of voice solutions.