AI is Giving CX a Makeover in Financial Services

This quote from Zappos’ former CEO Tony Hsieh will never go out of style: “Customer service should not be a department. It should be the entire company.” In financial services, where a level playing field has been years in the making alongside the rise of a digital world, customer service will determine winners and losers going forward.?

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People expect more, faster, better. While a bad customer service experience takes only a few minutes to form, the memory of it has a much longer, more detrimental impact. Multiply that by thousands of people and you’ve found a notable gap in, not only bottom-line results, but brand trust – a variable not so easily measured.

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The Qualtrics XM Institute’s 2023 Global Consumer Study entitled “What Happens After a Bad Experience, 2024” surveyed some 28,000 consumers. The study found that “51% of poor experiences with organizations resulted in consumers decreasing or cutting their spending entirely (38% decreased spending and 13% stopped spending).” In banking, this number was slightly higher with 40% decreasing spending and 14% stopping spending. For credit card providers, the numbers were 41% and 17%, respectively.

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Yet, no number of statistics can reflect the deeper story of a frustrating customer service experience. We’ve all been there. At best, we might say things like “I can’t stand being on hold for two hours every time I call them” or “They treated me like they didn’t even care.” At worst, we simply switch providers, saying nothing at all.?

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Customer Service, AI and the Highest Peak

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In my book “Ascend Your Startup: Conquer the 5 Disconnects to Accelerate Growth,” chapter five goes deep into the role of customer service as a competitive advantage. I describe the “highest peak” as a customer for life and a lifetime of commitment to the customer. Understanding your voice of customer, building out the customer room and delivering on promises are important because business as usual has fundamentally changed.?

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Old Story: Consumers tolerated a lot, had fewer options and had more direct contact with companies. A disgruntled customer service experience might be shared with 10 people or so in a person’s circle of influence.

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New Story: There are more buying options. Technology is the great equalizer as more business gets done online. A bad customer review can reach thousands.?

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Today, the risk of poor customer experience is much greater than even five years ago. Additional research by Qualtrics reveals that bad customer experiences cost $3.7 trillion annually – an increase of 19% from findings in 2023 ($3.1 trillion).?

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Great customer experiences fuel top-line revenue, customer retention and brand trust. Generative AI (GenAI) is essential gear for the climb.

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How is AI Improving the Customer Experience in Financial Services??

Customer experience should be seamless, enhancing touch points along the customer journey for financial institutions. Contact centers are where those touchpoints happen. This is where AI-ready infrastructure, security and talent converge to build out AI-based insights that transform the customer experience.

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But how do you build this out from scratch? The answer: you don’t.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center debuted in June 2024. It is the latest mile marker in 微软 ’s drive toward modernizing customer engagement. The Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is a contact center solution using Microsoft Copilot, an AI-powered digital assistant, to deliver GenAI across customer engagement channels.?

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center is built natively on the Microsoft cloud and connects to a business’s preferred customer relationship management system (CRM).? It includes native CRM (Dynamic 365 Customer Service CRM) or can integrate with other CRMs like Salesforce through more than 1,200+ pre-built connectors.

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This build-your-AI-on-what-you-have approach solves contact center problems with less friction and lower costs. It helps customers resolve issues faster and gives agents access to relevant context within an organic flow of work. Let’s look at some examples.?

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Dynamics 365 Contact Center uses GenAI to summarize and categorize cases that help contact centers behind the scenes. Integrated with Nuance’s interactive voice response (IVR) technology and Microsoft Copilot Studio’s no-code/low-code designer, self-service experiences become streamlined.

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Eat Your Own Dog Food

My first question to a potential vendor is: Do you use your own solution? This takes guts because you immediately see the ROI and how advanced it is – or isn’t. When you’re a customer of your own product, you are able to make it outstanding.

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The “big dogs” use their own product, and Microsoft is no exception. Before Microsoft’s support team began using its own tools, customer service and support (CSS) used 16 different systems and more than 500 individual tools — “slowing down service, hindering collaboration and producing inefficient workflows,” according to the Microsoft website. This was the “old” story, before embedding Copilot into the CSS solution.??

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After integrating Copilot, the CSS team found a 12% decrease in average handle time for chat engagements and 13% decrease in agents who needed peer assistance to resolve an incident, plus a 31% increase in first call resolution (a KPI that measures how well an issue is resolved the first time a customer calls) and 20% reduction in missed routes.

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Contact centers in Financial Services Institues require agents to create wrap-up notes at the end of each call. We are seeing agents reduce the time it takes to create these wrap-up notes by over 80%. And it's not just us; Ally Bank is seeing the same. This can translate to significant agent cost savings.

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By using generative AI to automate the note-taking and summarization processes, Ally has freed up its associates' time and allowed them to focus more on meaningful customer interactions. This move has not only enhanced productivity but also improved the overall customer experience. The AI solution was developed and implemented in just eight weeks. It has reduced post-call effort by 30% with a target of 50% and makes Ally’s call center operations more efficient and associates more engaged. The successful integration of AI underscores Ally's commitment to innovation and its focus on empowering employees while maintaining robust data security.

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Personalizing Data is Automation with the Human Touch

We build trust and loyalty through authentic human touch. It’s easy to say you care about customers, but it’s much harder to show it. When traveling to the West Coast, I always had a preferred hotel. It could be years between visits, but Mimi would hand me my favorite tea every time I entered the M Lounge. On one visit, not only was she gone, but the entire tenor of the hotel had changed under new ownership. I was no longer seen, no longer known, no longer remembered.?

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GenAI brings back the human touch that makes experiences, just like the ones Mimi created for guests, extraordinary.?Examples include an automatic alert that triggers a quick email or text on a birthday or special day or sending a reminder with next steps to renew an agreement a few months before the due date rather than at the point of negotiation. Imagine the power of making someone feel emotionally connected to a brand and better prepared for decision-making.

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Microsoft Copilot provides possibilities to personalize data, using GenAI to amplify the multi-channel customer engagement world we live in: voice, chat, SMS, social media. Rather than information overload, data becomes a tool for the same relationship building Leap talks about for Ally Financial. By using generative AI to streamline processes and enhance customer interactions, Ally is not just automating tasks but enriching the customer experience and deepening engagement.

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center combines automation with human connection to increase customer satisfaction. Achieve this and you’ve reached the highest peak – a customer for life.

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Great CX is Seamless

I love Broadway shows. It’s easy to lose yourself in the rich tapestry of a story. Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, Cats and Mama Mia are a few of my favorites. The performers make it look so easy. All I have to do is take in the magic. I don’t have to see how the sets were built, the lighting plot or the endless hours of rehearsal time. Similarly, when AI is baked into the customer experience, people don’t need to see what’s behind the curtain.

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Great CX becomes seamless at the crossroad of technology and humanity. This is where true growth lives. In financial services, AI is giving CX a dramatic makeover, helping customers ask, find, resolve, confirm, purchase, change, grow and, yes, even walk away feeling a bit of magic.