Transforming Customer Experience in Financial Services

To win the hearts of customers in today’s highly competitive market, financial institutions must deliver digital experiences as sophisticated as those of today’s leading technology giants. A critical element in promoting digital migration and improving the customer experience is the often neglected and underappreciated contact center.  To ensure customers a truly frictionless experience, financial institutions must put contact center improvements at the top of their list of strategic priorities.

Making Customer Experiences More Personal

Financial services customers demand experiences tailored to their needs. According to Accenture, 63% say they should receive personalized advice about products and services in exchange for sharing data about themselves. But many financial institutions confront challenges in delivering such personalized experiences because their systems and technology environments are especially complex. For instance, point solutions and rigid legacy systems have created disjointed workflows for both customers and agents. This makes it difficult for financial institutions to acquire, absorb, and analyze pertinent data, then integrate it into critical processes for customer-centric insights and timely recommendations.

One of the best ways of accelerating operations and ensuring high-quality, personalized experiences is through intelligent automation: machine learning, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, deep learning, image recognition, and beyond. How does intelligent automation work? Robotic process automation (RPA), for example, integrates directly with external applications and databases and communicates with rigid legacy systems. This enables organizations to leverage existing investments, automate manual processes, and free contact center agents’ time for selling and supporting more complex products. Using intelligent automation tools like RPA can help financial institutions achieve new levels of insight, contextuality, relevance, and personalization in their customer experiences.

Improving the Agent Experience

Contact center interactions represent nearly 30% of the encounters financial institutions have with their customers. Since contact center interactions, such as calling to report a stolen credit card, can have higher emotional stakes, they can represent a key opportunity for maintaining—or losing—customer loyalty.

Forward-thinking financial institutions are no longer thinking of their contact center as a necessary cost of doing business. They see this channel as a way to meet the growing demands of the modern customer. No longer thought of as a cost center, but as a profit center, and more importantly, a customer engagement center.

Agents cannot deliver exceptional services if they are burdened with siloed information. To gain a clear view of your customers, you need an easy-to-use interface that unifies all essential information. Agents shouldn’t be switching between tools to gather the information needed to determine a path of resolution or putting people on hold in order to find the answer to a question.

Appian’s Intelligent Contact Center™ can help. Automated processes give agents the power to improve the customer experience at every touchpoint. Meanwhile, an intuitive user interface delivers customers the convenience they want and financial institutions the visibility they need.

Appian’s Intelligent Contact Center™ connects to all your critical systems and data and pulls the disjointed information into a single interface and integrates with leading communication systems for a seamless customer experience. Appian streamlines processes to create the most stress-free experience for agents and customers alike.

Watch our latest webinar to hear Appian thought leaders Michael Heffner and Todd Marthaler discuss why some financial institutions struggle to create satisfying personalized experiences and how new technologies can help them leverage existing investments while modernizing the contact center experience.

You can also visit Appian’s Financial Services Resource Center for real-world use cases about driving successful customer experiences in banking.