British banking and insurance coverage holding firm NatWest Group serves 19 million clients throughout 12 banking and monetary providers manufacturers through its community of name centres. To ship the absolute best service to clients whereas additionally defending their knowledge, NatWest depends on cloud-native biometric safety answer Nuance Gatekeeper to observe incoming calls and confirm people’ identities.  

The Nuance answer streamlines the verification course of. This permits contact centre brokers to determine clients by way of pure dialog, eradicating the necessity for them to ask particular questions or request safety codes or secret solutions, and serving to to confirm clients shortly.  

NatWest Group is only one of many monetary providers organisations investing in Microsoft-powered applied sciences to empower customer support employees to work extra effectively and productively.  

“Contact centre agents who are properly trained on company policies and equipped with the right tools are able to deliver improved customer satisfaction and efficiency,” says Chris Caile, director of product advertising at Microsoft, and former director of options advertising and clever engagement at Nuance Communications, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2022.  

At the identical time, clients have grown accustomed to personalised service in different industries and count on no much less from their monetary providers suppliers.  

“As consumers, we are all similar,” explains Caile. “When issues arise with our bank, investment or insurance company, we call customer support and expect great service from the agents. Contact centre agents are the frontline to millions of customer interactions every day. Agents who lack the training and technology to instantly – and correctly – assist customers run the risk of hurting customer satisfaction and the business.”  

A examine commissioned by Microsoft discovered that some UK clients are ready for a median of eight minutes and 27 seconds to talk with a monetary providers consultant when phoning a name centre. This is 25.35 instances slower than the trade’s optimum normal for name centres, which requires brokers to reply calls inside 20 seconds, as reported by callcentrehelper.com. Caile means that monetary providers organisations ought to develop approaches to higher interact and empower name centre brokers for improved productiveness.   

“Beyond traditional employee onboarding and training for contact centre agents, the leading financial institutions look closely at their technology strategy and ask themselves if they have siloed departments or data that prevents agents from serving customers,” says Caile. “If so, they should work with a know-how supplier to discover a answer that can efficiently floor the best knowledge to brokers on the proper time.  

“Other considerations include how to effectively gather and share information with context from different departments, encouraging agent collaboration, and ensuring that customer data is secure and has the right biometric authentication at the frontline to build confidence that the customers are who they say they are.”  

For instance, public finance organisations are utilizing Nuance Gatekeeper to authenticate callers. The Australian Tax Office has considerably enhanced agent productiveness through the use of the Nuance answer to validate the identities of Australia’s eight million residents at any time when they name its contact centre. “The office’s previous authentication process required customers to provide personal details or have the correct documentation available,” says Caile. “This was time consuming for contact centre agents, amounting to a total of 75,000 agent hours annually. We’re helping to reduce every call by an average of 48 seconds, allowing agents to get on with assisting citizens.”  

Partnering for enhanced productiveness  

To present frontline monetary providers employees with the contextual knowledge they should serve clients, companies must streamline their info retrieval processes. They should additionally implement superior know-how options that allow seamless entry to real-time buyer info.  

An open structure allows banks to work together with their knowledge higher, in line with Dmitri Sedov, world head of knowledge intelligence at London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), who defined how LSEG and Microsoft intention to reshape the way forward for finance at world monetary providers occasion Sibos in September 2023. Sedov highlighted how the 2 companies will ship clever analytics options, out there in Microsoft 365, to assist monetary providers organisations enhance the shopper expertise. In addition to creating synthetic intelligence-driven self-service options to scale back incoming calls, banks will be capable of unify their knowledge by connecting with counterparts by way of Microsoft Teams and getting access to knowledge intelligence through Microsoft 365 Copilot.  

According to Microsoft, Copilot combs throughout an worker’s complete work knowledge, together with emails, conferences, chats, paperwork and extra, together with the net, to offer a complete view of their world. “Like an assistant, Copilot gets to know the employee, their job, and how they like to communicate,” says Caile. “Copilot then saves time in areas such as summarising a meeting, searching for information and drafting emails. Contact centre agents should see improved efficiency with real-time coaching and prompts for the next best action, freeing them up to engage with customers.”  

One financial institution benefiting from Microsoft 365 Copilot is the United Overseas Bank (UOB), which is trialling the answer to extend the productiveness of 300 of its staff. As a part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program, UOB has begun to make use of the generative AI-powered instruments to streamline processes for workers working throughout departments equivalent to branches, customer support, know-how and operations. The financial institution is already utilizing Copilot capabilities to summarise paperwork and electronic mail threads in Microsoft Outlook and perceive knowledge in Excel.  

Alongside Nuance, LSEG and UOB, Microsoft has partnered with over 50 know-how answer suppliers to empower employees within the monetary providers sector. Trade Ledger, for instance, has developed a brand new AI-powered utility, powered by Microsoft Azure, to offer monetary providers organisations with knowledge shortly and successfully. Users will be capable of ask easy pure language questions and the copilot will remodel them into queries concerning the enterprise and reply with the solutions that they want.  

Leading by instance  

Microsoft is utilizing its personal applied sciences to assist its personal customer support brokers too.  

“Microsoft employees use the Microsoft 365 suite of applications including Outlook, Word and Excel to be more productive,” says Caile. “Additionally, Microsoft operates one of the world’s largest customer support teams with tens of thousands of support engineers. Its customer engagement is built on Dynamics 365 Customer Service.”  

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps staff to ship quicker buyer care by drafting contextual and personalised solutions to buyer questions, and by offering an interactive chat expertise over information bases and case historical past. For Microsoft’s Customer Service and Support crew, which assists multiple billion clients worldwide, the Copilot instruments cut back the common deal with time by 12 per cent to offer quicker case decision with out peer help. This permits brokers to spend extra time on significantly tough circumstances.  

Beyond AI-powered instruments, steady coaching allows monetary providers organisations to empower and have interaction their employees.  

“Ongoing training ensures employees stay in sync with changing customer and market conditions as well as company policy changes,” says Caile. “For contact centre brokers, that is about making certain their particular person desktops floor the newest coverage, product and supply replace. AI-powered teaching additionally helps ability constructing by proactively providing insights into the right way to deal with every state of affairs, enabling the worker to each help the shopper and increase their information.  

“For supervisors and executives, AI-powered technology delivers the latest dashboards and views into queue performance, agent effectiveness and call resolution. This allows them to understand where agents are struggling to meet customer expectations and to improve processes.” 

Partner views 

We requested a collection of Microsoft companions ow they’re utilizing Microsoft technology-powered instruments to assist monetary providers organisations upskill staff and increase productiveness. 

“Avaya builds on Microsoft Azure to equip financial services organisations with AI-powered solutions that increase workforce productivity and upskill staff,” stated Giselle Bou Ghanem, senior director and product advertising lead at Avaya. “By integrating machine learning directly into agent workflows, Avaya transforms customer service representatives into highly efficient ‘bionic agents.” 

“Crestron Desk Scheduling solutions make it easy for financial services organisations to effortlessly transition to hot desking by enabling remote workers to book a space via software on their laptop before they come in to the office,” stated Toine C. Leerentveld, director of product administration for cloud and controls at Crestron. “Meanwhile, office-based employees can reserve a space by using the compact touch screen or quickly scanning a QR code, with highly visible LED status indicators displaying which desks are available to save them valuable time.” 

“ITSCREDIT provides an omnichannel platform that prioritises the digitisation of credit processes, offering flexibility, rapid time-to-market and complete control of the entire credit lifecycle,” stated Paulo Pinto, chief know-how officer at ITSCREDIT. “Our entire development is based on Microsoft technology, and we believe that leveraging modernised services such as the cloud, Azure AI and machine learning, security, and compliance tools, are crucial for financial institutions.” 

“Modern businesses are refocusing their attention to meet employee needs by integrating automation technology,” stated Andy Birkey, advertising communications specialist at Metafile Information Systems. “Financial services organisations are providing a comprehensive, automated accounts payable solution that works seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics 365, such as MetaViewer, to empower their workforce, leading to significant gains in productivity.” 

Read extra from these companions and others in the Winter 2023 issue of Technology Record. To get future points delivered on to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.