AI transforms bank contact centers into CX powerhouses: Capgemini report

PARIS, FRANCE — As customer expectations for hyper-personalization accelerate, the World Retail Banking Report 2024 by Capgemini revealed that bank contact centers are failing. 

Banks can turn this around by adopting AI-powered technologies to create next-generation intelligent contact centers, which will provide customers with a seamless experience through enhanced efficiency.

Overcoming bank contact center challenges

Despite past investments, ongoing technology limitations continue to frustrate both bank customers and employees. 

According to the report, over 60% of customers rate their chatbot experience as average, with predefined rules and templates restricting understanding of language or context nuances. 

Additionally, 61% of customers contact agents because they were unhappy with chatbot resolutions, and 18% abandon calls before reaching a representative at small- to medium-size financial services institutions.

From an employee perspective, more than 8 in 10 bank employees across all industry segments rated their contact center’s digitalization as low. A significant portion of their workday, 70%, is consumed by repetitive manual tasks, with less than 10% of agent time spent on up-selling and cross-selling.

The power of intelligent contact centers

To transform traditional contact centers into value creators that revitalize customer experiences, drive operational efficiency, and increase revenues, financial services leaders are adopting intelligent banking capabilities. 

This includes embracing artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, and predictive analytics.

By effectively infusing AI-powered intelligence, including generative AI, banks can optimize nearly 77% of employee time spent on operational and customer interaction activities. 

Most importantly, intelligent contact centers can act as omnichannel hubs, striking a balance between human and digital interactions.

Leveraging conversational AI chatbots

Enhancing chatbots with AI and generative AI enables them to offer personalized, contextually relevant interactions, improving efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

Upon detecting a customer’s question, a bot server interprets intent and context in real-time. Next, search and decision engines seamlessly work together to assemble appropriate data and present it as relevant information in the context of the customer’s inquiry.

Conversational AI chatbots use large language models (LLMs) along with data mined from enterprise knowledge bases to provide optimized, hyper-personalized responses that resemble human interactions. 

This integration provides customers with rich, seamless, and contextually relevant interactions, dramatically increasing efficiency and effectiveness.

Empowering agents with generative AI copilots

Bank executives express enthusiasm around the potential for multifaceted generative AI agent copilots to meet today’s customer experience (CX) expectations while streamlining contact center operations and driving efficiency. 

Generative AI copilots connect a bank’s silos of information, apply advanced comprehension algorithms, and supply customer service representatives with real-time, in-context business insights for every customer interaction.

Empowering agents with 360-degree views enables them to highly personalize each customer interaction, enhancing agent comprehension of call patterns, refining staff performance, bolstering overall efficiency, and facilitating the monetization of banking relationships.

The future of autonomous, self-driving banks

In today’s AI-driven digital banking era, it’s time to leave clunky phone menus and robotic voices behind. Banks are re-imagining contact centers as customer experience powerhouses by infusing them with intelligent technologies and unleashing a wave of new ideas and services that are directly informed by real-time customer interactions. 

Retail banks must implement AI and generative AI on an enterprise scale to transform contact centers intelligently, paving the way for autonomous and intelligent self-driving banks.