Over the last decade, banking services have undergone considerable change due to the rapid adoption of digital payments and several other digital services. These technologies provide ease of banking by enabling self-service and reducing branch visits. However, there are situations when visiting a bank branch or speaking to a contact centre agent is pertinent. These are the moments when customers often feel nervous, as these visits or calls could take a considerable part of their workday or result in a less-than-optimal solution.
Given the pace of digital transformation across industries, customers demand the same level of customised, personalised, fast and reliable experience from their banks as they do from their preferred e-commerce or ride-hailing platform. In other words, for banks, the key differentiator is not interest rates or commissions, but the customer experience.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Contact Centers Will Transform Banking Experiences
Today, most banks provide a digital platform, such as a website, smartphone app, ATM kiosk, etc., to carry out most banking transactions. Thus, a majority of transactions are self-served by the customers. With the power of data analytics and artificial intelligence, banks can offer a deeply personalized, omnichannel experience to their customers. The beauty of AI is that it learns more about customer behaviour, preferences, and needs with every interaction. This learning makes future transactions more personalised and meaningful.
Contact Centre Through a conversational interface, AI can help streamline transactions like money transfers, account balance checks, fraud reporting, or placing any other service request. Thus, customers do not have to fiddle on their banking platform to reach the correct page or section to place a bid. In addition, these capabilities can be enabled in multiple languages so that customers from a vast demographic can use digital banking services.
Contact Centre In addition to improving the customer experience, AI provides banks with a number of tangible benefits. As customers carry out most transactions without engaging with any bank employee or contact centre agent, the operational costs come down significantly. The AI capabilities also allow banks to understand their customers’ financial behaviour better and offer more relevant products and solutions. Thus, instead of mass emailers selling products that are entirely irrelevant to some customers, banks leverage cross-selling opportunities more effectively. This change helps banks operate on a completely different scale. Moreover, banks increase their customer loyalty and lifetime value with every interaction.
Banks can also improve employee satisfaction by using contact centre AI to increase customer lifetime value and reduce operational costs. As technology takes on several iterative customer requests and complaints, employees can focus on more complex and meaningful projects. They also experience a reduced workload. The time saved could also be used to reskill these employees for future requirements. As a result, employees can experience better career prospects in the mid-to-long term. The employees can also complement the AI-based contact centre if exceptional problems or service requests have not been captured in the standard template. Thus, the combination of humans and AI will shape the banking industry shortly.
Getting Started With The Contact Centre AI
Given the bouquet of tangible benefits, banks need to contact centre AI as a part of their digital transformation journey. The first step is to identify a technology partner with the experience and capability to integrate contact centre AI into your existing digital infrastructure seamlessly. Moreover, the partner should provide support at every step of the customer experience enhancement journey.
