When budgets drive business decisions, how can financial services leaders ensure that customer engagement and ease don’t fall by the wayside?
This challenge is the culmination of several large issues facing financial services companies today:
- The competitive gates have been thrown wide open with neobanks, direct banks, digital wallets, P2P payments, and digital banking in general changing how people manage, spend, and save their money.
- Economic pressures are sending banks on cost-optimization missions. The majority of banks (85%) surveyed by KPGM in Q4 2023 were planning to cut at least 5 to 10% of costs over the upcoming 36 months. About a third (36%) were aiming to cut 10 to 20%, while 15% wanted to cut more than 20 percent.
- Customer satisfaction isn’t optimal. Recently, the J.D. Power 2024 U.S. Direct Banking Satisfaction Study found customer satisfaction declined by 27 points year-over-year for checking customers. According to an interview with The Financial Brand, the key culprits for this decline were weaker customer service and slower problem resolution. Yet with just an average score of 688 out of 1,000, direct banks (those that do business digitally and have a banking charter) still score higher in customer satisfaction than traditional banks.
Cutting contact center costs: Why containment isn’t the answer
Optimizing costs in the contact center is often seen as a key solution to these challenges. More automated interactions will naturally lead to higher containment. Labor costs can decrease, while customers are still being helped. Win-win solution, right?
While lower containment rates look sexy on a quarterly report, unfortunately they don’t equate to the ease-filled, engaging experiences that financial consumers seek. A customer who ends a call or chat, frustrated and angry that their issue hasn’t been resolved, is contained. If they are sent to self-service articles that don’t really help, are told to visit the website to conduct a simple transaction, or give up on a long wait queue? Also contained.
In an increasingly global and digital world, competitors are just waiting to scoop up your unhappy customers, and those customers are just as ready to spread negative reviews and poor experiences online.
Containment simply isn’t enough to base contact center success upon. Increasingly, financial services and other companies are tracking Customer Effort Score, a quick survey question that evaluates how much effort someone had to exert to solve their issue. This score can be augmented by other KPIs, like first call resolution, abandonment rate, CSAT and NPS — and, yes, containment.
Personalization and ease without skyrocketing labor costs
So how do you boost your Customer Effort Scores and associated metrics while decreasing costs, all without relying too much on containment? The short answer is better, more human-like customer service automation.
The long answer is leveling up your conversational AI tech so that it can understand more and do more. A best-in-class solution empowers customers to self-service more intents, therefore increasing ease, satisfaction, and containment. It can even help live agents when chats and calls must be escalated and provide data that helps your company unearth hidden issues and serve customers better.
What are the key capabilities you should look for when upgrading your conversational AI to contain costs and boost CX?
- Superior understanding via state-of-the-art Conversational AI that is being continuously evolved with the latest AI advancements.
- The ability to have humans augment AI by interpreting challenging utterances in the background, thereby containing more calls and rendering AI “mistakes” invisible to customers.
- Machine learning that instantly ingests these human-tagged utterances to improve the system over time.
- Integrations with key banking, CRM, payment, appointment, and other systems to fuel personalization and self-service task completion.
- An omnichannel experience that remembers interactions, so that customers can move fluidly between chat and voice for assistance.
- Agent assists via information gathering that’s shared by the tech and Gen AI-driven contact summaries, suggested responses, and knowledge extensions.
- Advanced analytics that allow you to dig deep into your customer interactions to add intents and discover trending customer service topics.
- The regulatory, privacy, and security features that financial services companies require.
- A vendor that acts as a partner, regularly meeting with your company to dive into analytics together, plan for business and regulatory changes, and keep moving your tech forward in its abilities.
When more interactions are not just contained, but satisfactorily concluded via superior automation, your financial services company will enjoy multiple wins: seamless scalability without increased labor costs, better insight into customer needs, and more engaged customers.
To learn more about how a best-in-class conversational AI is built, check out our ebook Under the Hood. Or, to learn more about Interactions helps companies like yours balance cost optimization with customer ease, visit our Financial Services web page.
