Intelligence turns bank contact centers into value creators

As customer expectations for hyper-personalization accelerate, the World Retail Banking Report 2024 by Capgemini reveals that bank contact centers are falling short. Banks can turn this around by adopting AI-powered technologies to create next-generation intelligent contact centers, providing customers with a seamless experience through enhanced efficiency.

In brief

• Despite past contact center investments, ongoing technology limitations continue to frustrate bank customers and employees.
• By effectively infusing contact centers with AI-powered intelligence, banks can optimize employee efforts and create omnichannel customer service hubs, striking a balance between human and digital interactions.
• Banks can seize opportunities to develop next-generation intelligent contact centers by harnessing the power of conversational AI chatbots and AI-powered agent copilots.

It’s no secret that traditional banking, whether in-person visits, phone calls, or ATMs, is losing its luster. Although the trend toward digital banking began with the rise of smartphone apps, the pandemic forced branch closures that accelerated the migration of customers toward online channels.

Capgemini’s World Retail Banking Report 2024 underscores the enduring momentum of this transition. According to the report, 37% of customers prefer digital channels more, over branch visits, while 24% of customers have completely transitioned to a digital journey with their banks. 23% of customers are shifting to digital channels from physical branches.

Concurrently, banks have undertaken a wide range of digital transformation initiatives, including investing in their contact centers as pivotal customer engagement hubs. However, our research shows that efforts have largely fallen short.

Contact center experiences continue to frustrate customers

From a customer’s perspective, the World Retail Banking Report 2024 revealed that contact center technology limitations are frustrating customers. Observations include:

• Over 60% of customers rate their chatbot experience as simply average, as predefined rules and templates restrict understanding of language or context nuances.
• 61% of customers contact agents because they were unhappy with chatbot resolutions.
• 18% of customers abandon calls before reaching a customer service representative at small-to-mid-size financial services institution.
• 17% of customers generally distrust chatbots and preferred human agents.

Technology limitations reduce employee effectiveness

Equally stark are employee findings around call centers, demonstrating operational, cost, and revenue generation impacts.

According the report, contact center technology insufficiencies restrict staff ability to maximize engagement, which is pivotal for creating value for customers and the bank. These limitations frequently lead to subpar customer experiences and lost monetization opportunities.

More than 8 in 10 bank employees across all industry segments rated their contact center’s digitalization as low.

70% of a contact center representative’s work day is consumed by repetitive manual tasks. (Figure 1)

62% of large bank contact center agents, and 40% from small to mid-sized banks, report that insufficient chatbot capabilities adversely impact their productivity and efficiency.

Less than 10% of agent time is spent on up-selling and cross-selling. (Figure 1)

Figure 1 Technology limitations significantly reduce up-sell and cross-sell

The future: Contact centers as value creators

To transform traditional contact centers into value creators that revitalize customer experiences, drive operational efficiency, and increase revenues, financial services leaders are adopting intelligent banking capabilities. This includes embracing artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, and predictive analytics.

By effectively infusing AI-powered intelligence, including generative AI, banks can optimize nearly 77% of employee time spent on operational and customer interaction activities Most importantly, intelligent contact centers can act as omnichannel hubs, striking a balance between human and digital interactions.

With next-generation intelligent contact centers successfully integrated into a bank’s omnichannel strategy, financial services institutions can deliver hyper-personalized experiences that meet evolving customer experience expectations while slashing costs and empowering agents to build relationships that delight customers, improve brand affinity, and enhance profitability. 

Banks should seize opportunities to leverage technology to develop next-generation intelligent contact centers. In particular, they should harness the power of conversational AI chatbots and AI-powered agent copilots.

Conversational AI chatbots

Enhancing chatbots with AI and generative AI enables them to offer personalized, contextually-relevant interactions, improving efficiency and customer satisfaction (Figure 2). Upon detecting a customer’s question, a bot server interprets intent and context in real time. Next, search and decision engines seamlessly work together to assemble appropriate data and present it as relevant information in the context of the customer’s inquiry.

As part of the process, conversational AI chatbots use large language models (LLMs) along with data mined enterprise knowledge bases, including enterprise resource planning systems and customer relationship management, to provide an optimized, hyper-personalized responses that resemble human interactions.

In this way, integrating AI and generative AI technologies into chatbots provides customers with rich, seamless, and contextually-relevant interactions. Efficiency and effectiveness increase so dramatically that chatbot containment rates as much as double. Simultaneously, conversational chatbots foster customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Figure 2 Unlocking the power of conversational AI chatbots

Generative AI agent copilots 

In our research, bank executives expressed enthusiasm around the potential for multifaceted generative AI agent copilots to answer today’s customer experience (CX) expectations while streamlining contact center operations and driving efficiency. Generative AI copilots connect a banks’ silos of information, apply advanced comprehension algorithms, and supply CSRs with real-time in-context business insights for every customer interaction.

Empowering agents with 360-degree views enables them to highly-personalize each customer interaction. It also enhances agent comprehension of call patterns, helps refine staff performance, bolsters overall efficiency, and facilitates the monetization of banking relationships.

For complaint situations, copilots dive into historical data to determine successful resolutions, equipping agents with instantaneous insights and effective strategies for expertly addressing grievances and improving the CX.

Further, copilots can automate and streamline email responses, alleviating pressure on agents and ensuring timely, personalized, and accurate information delivery.

In collaboration with a copilot, agents can turn interactions into meaningful engagements that resonate with individual needs. This elevates each customer’s sense of value, enhancing overall satisfaction with the bank.

Conclusion

In today’s AI-driven digital banking era, it’s time to leave clunky phone menus and robotic voices behind. Banks are re-imagining contact centers as customer experience powerhouses by infusing them with intelligent technologies and unleashing a wave of new ideas and services that are directly informed by real-time customer interactions.

Retail banks must implement AI and generative AI on an enterprise scale to achieve intelligent transformation of contact centers, requiring a robust cloud infrastructure, reliable data foundation, accessible LLMs under strong AI governance, in-house expertise, and rigorous protocols. Also, intelligence should permeate all banking operations, aiming to pave the way for autonomous and intelligent self-driving banks.

To learn more about AI-powered use cases and gain insights on how banks are taking a transformational leap by establishing intelligent contact centers, contact our experts today.