Conversation Intelligence: Impacting customer service in the BFSI sector in 2023

1

By Saikat Chakrabarty, Senior Manager – Engineering, Mihup

There has been a major transformation in BFSI operations in the last three years which led to the higher components of digital integration, automation, and online services in every aspect of banking now. As we get ready to enter a new year, the post-pandemic playbook of customer service through the integration of smart technology will replace the good old service manuals.

Why we are saying so?

This is because customer service is no longer just about having a contact center where people call in, and get responses to their queries or support requests. Today’s BFSI contact centers are expected to not only provide the desired response and support but also guide customers toward ideal solutions. Essentially, there has to be a switch towards generating greater insights from customer-agent call conversations and deploying these insights to enrich the quality of future customer interactions.

With the evolution of AI and NLP technologies, cloud-based Conversation Intelligence platforms have emerged as the key problem-solvers for BFSI players. The transactional and data-driven nature of services offered by BFSI companies requires constant monitoring of market conditions and an understanding of customer expectations. Both of these vary dynamically under the influence of factors like recession, inflation, pandemic, and other events. By deploying Conversation Intelligence, BFSI enterprises can monitor, analyze, and improve customer service.

A world-class Conversation Intelligence platform empowers enterprises to evaluate customer conversations and extract insights related to agent performance and customer attributes like call intent, choice of words, voice, energy, tone, etc. These insights give them the ability to respond to changes in a dynamic and customer-centric manner. The legacy nature of BFSI operations and the strong emphasis on regulations and processes led to a scenario where they had struggled to make their operations more customer friendly.

In the wake of the pandemic, there is a tectonic and platonic shift leading to enterprises not only putting more emphasis on superior customer service but also identifying the value of AI-powered analytics generated by Conversation Intelligence platforms in achieving their objectives. We saw the awareness grow throughout 2022, and it will now become a major trend in 2023. BFSI players are keen to deploy Conversation Intelligence to replace their manual quality analysis processes where QAs would personally listen to random conversations, evaluate each call as per the checklist and share their summary feedback with the managers. The repetitive effort and the humongous workload results in quality analysts analyzing not more than 2% to 5% of calls, with challenges such as biases, errors due to oversight, and incorrect understanding of the conversation.

In today’s highly competitive environments where every failure to deliver great customer service can drive a customer away, such error-prone and slow processes are not acceptable for BFSI enterprises. Leading players need to continuously focus on using technology and initiatives that keep them help them stay ahead. The emergence of online aggregators in sectors like insurance or digital banks has further made the landscape more challenging for conventional banks and insurance companies etc.

The speech analytics system powered by the Conversation Intelligence platform will help BFSI enterprises overcome these challenges in 2023 through its ability to deliver.

Superior and speedier response: Cloud-based Conversation Intelligence platforms can seamlessly integrate with enterprise CRM. Thus, they can listen to real-time conversations, and share onscreen nudges to help agents deliver seamless customer service. For instance, it would be able to improve probing by suggesting the questions that agents should ask. The system would also automatically pull out relevant information from the database by focusing on the keywords used during the conversation leading to a more personalized, faster, and engaging experience for customers. The accuracy of the response improves and the overall customer service is far superior to the typical perception of a BFSI contact center. Since the agents can provide relevant and helpful responses without putting the callers on hold for a long duration, they are considered more knowledgeable, efficient, and willing to help as compared to the rival brands.

Better customer understanding: Automation of QA processes through Conversation Intelligence, enables the QA teams to analyze 100% of customer-agent call conversations and understand insights and metrics related to agent’s performance and their capability of quick resolution of customer queries. This leads to superior customer understanding and modification of agent training processes, data in CRMs, and business communication. It also leads to an organization-wide improvement of customer service and development of agent soft skills upgradation, training programs, product awareness, etc. The AI-driven approach also identifies compliance gaps and ensures that repeated mistakes are eliminated and compliance violations are avoided.

Conclusion

In the years ahead, the BFSI market will become fully digitized, lean, and agile. To stay ahead of trends and competition, the players need to use advanced technologies like Conversation Intelligence and build a superior brand reputation. Any banking, insurance or financial service provider that is known to the customers as a friendly, responsive, and ethical brand will be able to grow faster, and Conversation Intelligence will fuel that growth!

1 COMMENT

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here