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Just recently, I inadvertently realized that having a savings bank account with one of the biggest banks won’t necessarily assure me of better customer service. Case in point, my bank issued credit card had just expired, and a new card was due. Now since my address had changed, all that the bank was expected to do was reroute the card to my new address. Simple, right? Well, not quite, at least for this bank. For over a month, I repeatedly made phone calls, most of the time navigating through their insensible IVR, and sending emails, only to realize at the end of the day various customer support teams for this bank don’t communicate with one another, leaving customers frustrated and in a quandary.
Now, if this is the plight of one of the major European banks having offices in scores of countries around the world, what about the lesser known banks? Consumers today are accomplishing more and more on digital channels but their quest for a human-like conversation to get their problem solved, has never been greater. Having a rudimentary chatbot or an archaic IVR won’t work anymore. Consumers want to be heard, wherever they are, on any device, whenever they need the help.
As we all know that today we are on the verge of a revolution in Conversational AI thanks to easy availability of Big Data, advanced analytics and digital technologies. Most brands want to offer a truly personalized yet highly scalable digital customer engagement. Despite all this, there is a yawning gap between what is truly possible with Conversational AI and automation and how major brands are implementing it.
Importance of Conversational Automation
The banking industry is in dire need of offering a personal touch today more than ever thanks to the empowered set of digital savvy customers. Using an AI-powered platform like Conversational Automation (CSA) is how banks can truly deliver transformational customer service experiences.
Let’s now discuss some pertinent issues faced by most large banks. For starters, they are not able to engage with long-term, high value customers thanks to several constraints. Next, automating repetitive and mundane tasks is high on the agenda of most banks but they just don’t know how. Scaling the business rapidly is another challenge that most banking enterprises face, as a direct fallout of the inability to service customers or prospects the right way. High cost of operations, especially for customer support and service, is another one of the major problems hobbling most banks around the world.
The banking industry around the world is a highly regulated industry. There are a lot of aspects related to compliance which banks need to adhere to in order to carry on business. A lot of these compliance issues are directly associated with the customer service. So, the customer service reps need to be aware of these at all times or else it can lead to rapid escalation and legal complications.
Thankfully, Conversational Automation can help resolve most of these problems. Intelligent automation can improve self-service capabilities. Speech Analytics can help gather valuable insights to engage high value customers. All this when done right can improve the sales efficiency to convert leads, increase the chances of upsell and cross-sell, improve customer engagement (with better CSAT & NPS of course) and it can reduce the cost of operations while maintaining sterling customer service standards. The Conversational Automation can ensure that the contact center agent adheres to the script, touches upon all the compliance & disclosure topics, or else it raises real-time alerts and red flags.
To understand a common banking customer service chasm, let’s consider what happens during a typical banking customer service call. The customer might connect with the bank via a chatbot, a website, mobile app, social media or any other channel. Again, the conversation could be a service request, complaint or just plain information seeking. And how do most banks respond; summarizing it in one word – unsatisfactory. So, what is the solution?
Help is at hand. An AI-powered Conversational Automation platform can ensure that no matter the channel the customers prefer to communicate with the bank, they can always enjoy an omni-channel experience. Customers can seamlessly continue a conversation started over an email on to a telephone call thanks to speech analytics and automation working in the background. The contact center agent will have enough context on the customers every time they call, again thanks to the power of AI and analytics under the hood.
Conversational Automation lets contact center agents focus 100% on the call and conversation so they can do what they do best – empathize with the customers. All other mundane tasks can be handled by the Conversational Automation platform. If there are any simple queries that don’t require a human touch in the first place, the AI can take over such calls with utmost efficiency and it will know exactly when to hot transfer the call to a human agent, along with the complete call context and customer background given to the agent in real-time. Now, imagine this customer service experience.
These are just a few of the advantages that Conversational Automation can offer to banking enterprises. In fact, banks can benefit from this AI-powered platform regardless of whether the call is an outbound call like sales, collections, document verification or an inbound call like service request, transaction initiation, query resolution, information seeking, or just about anything.
Interested in finding out more about Conversational Automation? Check out this blog from our CEO, Umesh Sachdev.
You can also get in touch with Uniphore to learn how your brand can benefit from Conversational Automation.