Financial services, whether it be banking, investing, or insurance, has seen massive digital transformation around self service and customer service. Ruled-based chatbots, self-service interfaces, and automation have changed the way that customers interact with your brand. However, that hasn’t changed the fact that live agent voice support is still the primary channel for high-value customer transactions.Â
As a result, agents are still the lifeblood of modern financial services industries. They’re your brand representatives, entrusted with driving a world-class customer experience that yields higher customer acquisition and retention rates. Â
So investing in impactful coaching to ensure that your agents can provide best-in-class customer experience, and at the same time, reducing risk in the wide variety of regulatory compliance risk, you’re positioning your contact center to stand out from the rest.Â
That’s where contact center AI comes into play.
Contact center AI is a technology that helps financial service organizations transform conversation outcomes by providing highly accurate speech analytics on 100% of calls and automating tedious parts of the quality management processes. With contact center AI, teams like yours can automatically surface the most meaningful areas of opportunity to better coach agents and improve processes. Â
By analyzing 100% of calls, you gain full visibility into what’s happening in your contact center in near real-time. From there, you can help the whole team work as one to improve agents by monitoring words and phrases; measuring all of your CX metrics from a central dashboard, such as average handle time, supervisor escalations, and customer sentiment; and identify which agents need help. Or, better yet, celebrate top performers.Â
In turn, analysts and supervisors can uncover insights from calls to drive more effective coaching programs and ensure compliance protocols are properly followed.
Your desired business outcomes revolve around delivering a positive customer experience to everyone who calls in. As a result, you need to know what’s causing customer frustrations and unmet needs. Or vice versa -- what interactions are driving the experience and outcomes you want, such as customer acquisition and retention.
There’s a treasure trove of business insights in every call, so uncovering and reporting on those insights is critical. This is where you can discover call drivers (why customers are calling in), why customers are churning, and overall trends that may be impacting your business.Â
Bringing in new customers and retaining your existing customer base is your most important business metric. The interaction types that impact acquisition and retention - agent/customer rapport, agent efficiency, operational efficiency, compliance, and more all play a big role in driving those outcomes. You need to be able to identify those interactions while constantly - and rapidly - improving them.
Acquiring new customers and retaining their business are two of the most critical metrics you're solving for. Your agents are responsible for providing that great experience to hit those goals. With contact center AI, identify key phrases used across calls at key times. This will help you more deeply understand your customer journey, monitor the more impactful talk tracks, and discover trends on the most requested products and services.
Consider your core sales script as an example. By capturing deep insights into 100% of customer conversations, you can understand exactly where customers churn, what dialogues they receive positively, and what is impacting agent effectiveness.
Your agents are your frontline representatives. Enabling them to crush their KPIs starts with monitoring 100% of interactions for customer sentiment and experience insights. From there, you can create more targeted agent enablement programs built with context around why and how to improve metrics like CSAT and NPS scores.Â
With 100% call coverage, you can also understand the customer journey from end-to-end, empowering you to uncover new ways to better personalize your service. You’ll find trends that’ll allow you to act proactively, rather than reactively, on delivering a better customer experience.Â
Try monitoring these metrics:
Providing live support is expensive. As a result, focusing on monitoring agent efficiency metrics based around resolving the call quickly and on the first attempt is key to reducing operational costs.Â
Success lies in uncovering root causes of operational inefficiency, knowing what self-service solutions could solve simple problems at scale, and identifying where self-service falls short.
With constantly evolving regulations and legislature, you must be ahead of the game when it comes to compliance, especially in an industry as heavily regulated as financial services. It begs the question, how do you ensure compliance while providing a world-class customer experience?
That starts with monitoring every conversation that takes place, not just a random sampling of just 1-2% of calls. Coverage is key in compliance mitigation - you simply can’t allow anything to slip through the cracks. Critical compliance metrics include:Â
With valuable information in every voice call, analyzing, aggregating and disseminating business insights across the entire organization drives better business decisions. It’s key to creating a culture of transparency, trust, and collaboration, and minimizes team friction, helping teams work as one.
Understanding how customers are responding to a new product line helps marketing deliver stronger campaigns. Uncovering major pain points and unmet customer needs helps calibrate product management's roadmap.Â
Discovering the good and bad moments leading to conversions and churn helps sales better enable their agents to close more business. These are the key business insights surfaced from every call, impacting every function of the business.
We've spoken to dozens of financial services organizations looking for new ways to improve their agent performance, mitigate compliance risk, and provide a world-class customer experience on every call they field.
One story in particular we love to tell is Root Insurance's, who, while experiencing rapid growth in their team and monthly interactions, took the guesswork out of their quality programs through the power of contact center AI. As their Compliance Manager Kyle Kizer put it:
“Success for our team means bringing out the best in each agent. We’re able to do that by throwing out the one size fits all coaching approach and tailoring conversations on an individual basis. Contact center AI helps ensure you’re an optimized leader by identifying and addressing the right gaps.”
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Joe Hanson leads content marketing at Observe.AI. Want to guest blog? Or maybe you have some expertise you want to share? Connect with him on LinkedIn.