A game plan for financial institutions and credit unions, Part 2: Process modernization

Part 2 of a 2-part blog series for Financial Services and Credit Unions.

Flexibility optimizes the experience

The battle for the best client and member experience is well underway, and financial services institutions (FSIs) and credit unions need a firm handle on it to stay relevant. Since we first published this series, AI has moved from pilot projects to everyday tools in the contact center, and client and member expectations have risen with it. To keep pace, FSIs and credit unions must redefine how they engage with clients and members, remove departmental silos, and adopt a truly omnichannel approach.

But how? Simplified, successful process modernization

The answer is to create a comprehensive experience with end-to-end capabilities that can be mixed and matched to integrate and optimize any communication channel, method, or medium. Fundamentally, organizations must simplify and accelerate the flow of information.

If clients and members expect more flexibility at the front end, the system architecture and processes behind it must be agile enough to deliver it.

Why legacy processes hold you Back

The reality is that inflexible, proprietary, or closed legacy systems, and the processes built around them, are holding back digital transformation by making it much harder to innovate. These processes are also expensive to sustain, both in the staff time required to maintain them and in the push-back that typically follows any attempt to change them. Organizations often find that changing unwieldy legacy processes is unpredictable, with surprises both upstream and downstream even when every step has been mapped in detail. That unpredictability can put customer data at risk. It also makes it harder to adopt AI safely, because AI is only as good as the data and workflows it can access.

The industry norm, set by the most agile fintechs and big tech companies, is to use flexible, open-standards-based, API-first systems. These allow new functionality to be shared across diverse platforms and applications using standardized processes and protocols.

Modern cloud platforms make it possible to deploy advanced features quickly and efficiently. With the right infrastructure in place, they can deliver capabilities that exceed customer expectations with minimal operational upheaval, and they can be deployed and scaled at will. With a modular architecture, FSIs and credit unions can innovate their services the same way: quickly, and in line with customer needs and expectations. A hybrid approach also means organizations don’t have to rip and replace their core systems to get there.

Putting AI to work across the customer journey

The newest contact center technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI), take full advantage of this approach. Conversational and generative AI can extract insight from every touchpoint in the customer journey, transcribing and summarizing interactions in real time, detecting sentiment and intent, and surfacing the next best action for the agent. This insight shows what needs to be done, how to improve the way clients and members are served, and how to eliminate the delays and obstacles that slow the resolution of recurring issues.

For exceptional cases, interactions can be assessed to determine which processes and strategies will ensure exceptions are handled consistently and successfully over time. The question is not whether to transform, but how and when.

In a regulated industry, how AI is introduced matters as much as what it does. FSIs and credit unions should keep humans in the loop for consequential decisions, make it easy for clients and members to reach a person, and make sure AI-generated responses are accurate, explainable, and auditable. Building these guardrails into the process from the start makes it far easier to scale AI with confidence.

How do you ensure the ethical, compliant use of contact center AI? Watch Enghouse VP of Product Management, Steve Nattress, in interview with CX Today.

With a greater capacity to innovate, new technologies and the process flexibility they bring let FSIs rapidly test new ways of serving clients and members. Small, incremental changes can be developed, implemented, and evaluated quickly. Organizations can then continuously introduce new features that improve the customer experience while building richer, more insightful data on how best to engage and serve their clients and members.

Contact centers have evolved along with other digital technologies, becoming more flexible so they can respond quickly to more demanding customers. Consumer apps and mobile devices have made near-instant response the expectation, whether customers want to find information, update their profiles or orders, or reach an empowered agent with the skills and authority to make things right, whatever the issue.

Turning interaction data into better self-service

The data generated at each touchpoint can then be used to develop and deliver self-service capabilities that resolve customers’ issues faster. By aggregating and analyzing every customer-agent interaction, made feasible with AI-powered analytics that cover all conversations rather than a small sample, the organization can see the most common issues, what a satisfactory resolution looks like, and whether customers contact the organization again about the same issue.

With that understanding, organizations can put technologies and processes in place to give customers relevant information before they need a live agent, through intelligent virtual agents, proactive notifications, and AI-enhanced knowledge bases. This approach increases customer satisfaction and frees agents from repetitive basic tasks, so they can focus on the conversations where a human touch matters most.

Cloud-based contact center solutions make it simpler to ensure that processes, and the customer data they generate, flow smoothly and securely to other applications, helping the organization meet customer service expectations quickly.

Collaboration: The key to first contact resolution

As we noted in the first blog in this two-part series, better communication and collaboration is one of the most significant improvements organizations can make to the client and member experience.

With seamless collaboration across the contact center and the wider organization, front-line staff, whether they work in a branch, in the office, or remotely, can quickly connect with subject matter experts (SMEs), colleagues, back-office staff, and department heads to resolve client and member issues on the first contact, reducing frustration and stress for everyone involved.

This is transformational. With digital technologies, all the right data can be made available to agents immediately, and AI-powered agent assist can surface relevant knowledge, policies, and account context in the moment, helping them make informed decisions. At the same time, giving agents the authority to make decisions that resolve customer issues delivers a better experience for everyone. It streamlines the resolution process and reduces, or even eliminates, unnecessary escalations and wasted time. Redesigning processes with this in mind gives agents more latitude to do the right thing for their customers, which leads to higher job satisfaction.

Make your website work as hard as your agents

FSIs and credit unions also need to actively maintain their websites so they provide the information clients and members are looking for, in enough detail to inform, educate, and reassure visitors that dealing with the organization is safe and secure. By integrating live chat, AI-powered chatbots, SMS, messaging apps, social media, and video, organizations can let website visitors securely engage with contact center agents to get specific information, access detailed pricing, or even complete a transaction. Organizations that don’t offer these engagement options will fall short of visitor expectations, and those visitors will go elsewhere in growing numbers, even if they have been longstanding customers.

Building business rules into every process

More flexible technologies allow older, manual, rigid processes, with checkpoints, reviews, and authorizations required at every step, to be simplified, made more flexible, and easily optimized. Increasingly, AI can automate routine steps within these workflows, such as data entry, after-call summaries, and form completion, while routing exceptions to the right person.

Building specific business rules into each new process, and reviewing and revising them regularly, ensures that customer engagements flow smoothly, efficiently, and effectively across the organization, because the rules are applied automatically at every step of the new technology-enabled process flow. The benefits are felt across the board:

• Customers benefit from faster access to the information they need, resulting in higher first contact resolution (FCR), shorter wait times and average handle time (AHT), and improved customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS).
• Agents benefit from improved processes that don’t add onerous requirements, along with the latitude and authority to make customer-centric decisions that benefit everyone. They also get instant access to key decision-makers when an exceptional situation calls for a deviation from established business rules.
• The organization, its agents, and its customers all benefit because every digital communication is captured, analyzed, indexed, and securely stored. Everyone has a clear, unbiased, and verifiable record of every interaction across voice, video, text, and social media, including confirmation of any decisions made. Any question about what happened, how, and why can be quickly reviewed and resolved using this objective record, which also supports compliance and regulatory reporting.

It’s a clear win-win for all.

The lesson learned: by adopting more flexible technologies and the process improvements they make possible, FSIs and credit unions can compete more effectively for client and member loyalty, iteratively optimizing their collaboration, communications, and customer engagement where and how it matters most. Processes are no longer static. They become as dynamic as the customers they serve, and they keep improving with every new release, especially as AI capabilities continue to advance.

Contact us to find out how Enghouse Interactive can help you modernize your processes, or explore our financial services solutions.