Along with telecommunications service providers and healthcare organizations, financial services companies can be strained by the large volume of inquiries, often driven by uncontrollable external events. Volatility in the stock market, shifts in interest rate policies, or personal circumstances, such as job loss or the need to quickly tap an account to fund a major purchase, can increase the urgency to interact with an institution to accomplish a task.

Not surprisingly, financial services firms have been focusing on ways to better serve their customers in a more personalized and efficient manner. According to research from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Community survey:

• In 2022, about 50% of respondents stated they are looking to leverage customer data toward real-time personalization; compared to only 36% in 2021.
• As physical interactions have been on the rise and are expected to continue, 37% of the respondents said that their CX budgets allocated toward creating a Unified CX across physical and digital channels is expected to rise.
• To improve customer call handling:
  • 62% have integrated customer relationship management (CRM) into their call center resources
  • 61% have improved agent training
  • 55% use automated call distribution technologies
  • 51% use call scoring or other evaluation methods
• 51% believe their customers will embrace digital financial tools over physical branch services in the next 12 months.

Indeed, the key components to delivering a better CX in financial services include the presence of smarter tools that allow for greater automation and self-service capabilities, the seamless integration of customer journey information, and the proper level of training for agents to assist when a customer encounters confusion or friction.

Consider a customer that is trying to purchase a home. They are anxious, stressed out, and, in many cases, unfamiliar with the process and all the steps required in the mortgage application process. In some situations, they may simply want to handle a task themselves, quickly and easily, such as downloading account statements or reviewing and signing disclosure forms. But in other cases, they may need more hands-on service, and technology can be utilized to identify likely stumbling blocks, and then ensure the customer has the resources they need.

CX vendors such as Nice, 8×8, Oracle, Genesys, Zendesk and other vendors have realized the challenges in providing excellent CX within the financial services industry, and offer tailored solutions that allow institutions to support both in-person and digital customers. At the heart of each of these vendors’ offerings is the focus on the use of customer journey information and data to inform interactions, which allow customers to receive more personalized experiences. Increased personalization not only improves efficiency and satisfaction, but can also drive customer loyalty.

One way in which this customer journey information can be leveraged and merged with product and service data is through knowledge bases and automated guides. Knowledge bases are extremely valuable to customers who are actively seeking specific answers to more general questions, and can be continuously updated by mining customer queries. Guides, however, are designed to remain in the background, and can be triggered when there are specific opportunities to provide customers with more information or to suggest next steps relevant to their situation or task they are trying to accomplish. These guides can be enabled based on customer data, customer actions (such as uploading a form), or even by their inaction (such as measuring dwell time on a page, and then prompting the customer with a pop-up guide).

The advent of large-language model (LLM), generative AI technology can also be used to improve the functionality of chatbots. Chatbots that were deployed only a few years ago still struggle with some complex requests, and can get tripped up when customers’ requests are not framed in a typical or standardized way. Although the technology has gotten better, the integration of ChatGPT-like functionality in contact center and back-end CX software likely will help improve customers’ experiences with these automated tools.

That said, for very personal or complex financial transactions or processes, having trained agents that have experience handling these situations likely will always be the key to delivering an excellent customer experience. But these workers can be further supported by software platforms that can do more behind the scenes, such as smartly managing work streams by intelligently routing and queuing omnichannel interactions into a single queue matched to an employee’s skills.

Further, these platforms should be able to quickly accumulate relevant customer and transaction histories from the CRM and other back-office systems and presenting that data to the employee. AI can be used to suggest the next-best-action, based on successful, similar interactions and outcomes.

Finally, process automation should be deployed to conduct after call work accurately and with consistency, including capturing interaction feedback, setting follow-up appointments or check-ins, and liaising with other departments or organizations, if necessary.