intelligence turns bank contact centrEs into value creators

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

In brief

• Despite past contact centre investments, ongoing technology limitations continue to frustrate bank customers and employees.
• By effectively infusing contact centres with AI-powered intelligence, banks can optimise 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 centres 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 centres as pivotal customer engagement hubs. However, our research shows that efforts have largely fallen short.

Contact centre experiences continue to frustrate customers

From a customer’s perspective, the World Retail Banking Report 2024 revealed that contact centre 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 centres, demonstrating operational, cost, and revenue generation impacts.

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

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

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

62% of large bank contact centre 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 centres as value creators

To transform traditional contact centres into value creators that revitalise 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 optimise nearly 77% of employee time spent on operational and customer interaction activities Most importantly, intelligent contact centres can act as omnichannel hubs, striking a balance between human and digital interactions.

With next-generation intelligent contact centres successfully integrated into a bank’s omnichannel strategy, financial services institutions can deliver hyper-personalised 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 centres. 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 personalised, 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 optimised, hyper-personalised 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 centre 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-personalise each customer interaction. It also enhances agent comprehension of call patterns, helps refine staff performance, bolsters overall efficiency, and facilitates the monetisation 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, personalised, 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 centres 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 centres, 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.e

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