Options for better customer-centric experiences
To survive and then emerge stronger from these challenging times, banks need to
improve both the digital and person-to-person experiences. That requires new
and improved ways for banks to understand and act on end-to-end conversations
with the customer—from self-service channels (mobile, web, and chatbot) to live
agent interactions.
Self-service channels still do not understand customer sentiments or intents nor
transfer this context as conversations move between channels. Agents have
limited in-call coaching guidance or lack immediate access to customer
information, which increases average handle times. That’s because point solutions
do not cover the entire conversation and instead create additional silos within the
customer journey.
What is needed is a platform that completely leverages conversational AI and
workflow automation to bridge humans and machines and back office and front
office operations throughout the customer conversation and across digital and
voice channels. Essentially, this is Conversational Service Automation (CSA). Retail
banks can use CSA to meet the needs of customers with empathy and
understanding. The platform helps agents be more effective and productive,
whether working from home or in the contact center. It also ensures continuity in
delivering a high-quality experience at lower costs.
Retail banks can deploy CSA to eliminate friction by automating and
transforming the end-to-end customer journey by:
- Conversational Self-Service: Intelligent virtual assistants can be deployed
to speak to customers in their local language and respond to frequently
asked questions such as locating an ATM, finding out the hours of
operation, applying for a new product, filing a stop-payment request, and
more. Conversational A.I. helps banks understand customer sentiment and
intent to drive self-service automation rates, thus reducing contact center
costs. Should a customer need agent assistance, CSA passes context from
self-service to agents to create a frictionless interaction. - Agent Co-Pilot: Deploying real-time customer context analysis, including
sentiment and intent, to help co-pilot agent performance with in-call
coaching alerts, giving agents insights to be more empathetic. Automating
after-call work and call disposition across high-value banking journeys such
as mortgage refinance applications to ensure higher accuracy and reduce
average handle time, shortens wait times for customers. - Post-Call Analytics: Automating post-call analytics on 100% of customer
interactions, including voice, email, and chat, to understand reasons for
customer churn and sales effectiveness. CSA also helps drive 100%
compliance and identifies other core, customer- and agent-centric
experience areas for planning and operational improvements. Banks can
also derive insights into how customers use self-service channels and
identify potential friction points in a customer journey to optimize
customer experience.
Keeping the conversation going
As consumers navigation habits have changes over these challenging times, their
conversations with agents or intelligent virtual assistants will have a long-term
effect on how they feel about the bank. It will also affect how long they stay with
the bank as they move from using branches to embracing digital banking services.
Only by automating conversations and taking a customer-centric approach can
banks deliver the kind of frictionless experiences customers seek. Using CSA will
not only help banks to overcome these immediate challenges and emerge
stronger, but it will also provide them a robust infrastructure upon which to base
their future growth strategies.