Financial services refined: Elevating customer experience through automation and AI

Change is good...

Since the earliest days of the industry, financial services firms have built their brands on caution, stability, and reliability. And today's customers still place a premium on those qualities. But they also want something more. They expect on-demand service, personalized engagement, and seamless end-to-end interactions. In other words, they want their bank to be innovative—especially when it comes to helping them overcome their challenges.

The quality of customer experience is how firms differentiate themselves and win in a crowded and competitive market. For those not prioritizing great customer experience, it's also how they lose. And for a growing number of industry leaders, automation is the driver of these modern customer experiences that customers expect. What's more? When infused with artificial intelligence (AI), automation can enable a level of service that most customers didn't realize was possible.

Customer experience reigns supreme. But it's not just about operating a contact center anymore—it's about creating meaningful interactions and relationships with customers that keep them on your side for years to come.

Current challenges in customer experience

Delivering an excellent customer experience is not easy, though. Businesses grapple with several challenges that impede their ability to provide seamless interactions. Fragmented systems—typical of legacy infrastructure—operate in silos, creating barriers to cohesive customer engagement. These siloed systems hinder the flow of information and make it challenging to deliver a unified experience across different touchpoints.

Moreover, inefficiencies in processes exacerbate the situation, causing delays and frustrations for both customers and employees alike. Disjointed processes not only impede the smooth execution of tasks, but also compromise the quality of service delivery. Additionally, the lack of coordination poses a significant hurdle in orchestrating various touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

Many vendors have offered products that try to mitigate these challenges. However, they almost always fail to offer a holistic solution across the entire customer experience landscape. The realities of siloed teams, different systems in different departments, and fragmented workflows allow point solutions to only go so far. Luckily, that's where business orchestration offered by a true end-to-end automation platform can come in.

The advantage of AI-powered automation

Reduce the human level of effort

AI-powered automation holds immense potential in reducing the human level of effort required in customer interactions. By leveraging data and context in a smarter way, businesses can create experiences that are intuitive for customers to request and complete tasks. This ultimately lowers the cost of service.

Through guided or next-best action experiences, AI and automation can help cut costly mistakes, making sure that requests are handled efficiently and in a closed loop. This ensures work gets done the right way, the first time. Moreover, simplifying the experience of using systems and making requests accelerates adoption and boosts productivity.

Why?

Because employees can navigate processes and deliver service more intuitively, and focus on delivering value-added services rather than grappling with cumbersome tasks.

Enable proactive, predictive, and personalized service

AI-powered automation enables businesses to provide tailored offers and experiences based on customers' usage patterns and buying behavior, thereby driving more sales. By analyzing data on customer preferences, behaviors, and past interactions, businesses can personalize offers and recommendations, increasing the likelihood of conversion and customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, AI can minimize customer frustration by using standard processes and system data to anticipate and resolve issues at the first point of contact. Or often, before these issues even occur.

Moreover, proactive service empowers businesses to provide customers with important information without the need to manually search or inquire. By anticipating customers' needs and delivering relevant information in a timely manner, businesses can enhance the overall customer experience and foster stronger relationships.

Increase digital capabilities and adoption

By removing a whole host of process complexity, AI-powered automation increases preferred-channel containment and dramatically reduces escalations. By integrating systems and data on the back end, businesses can confidently provide a seamless experience on the front end, regardless of the channel chosen by the customer.

By analyzing data on customer interactions and system performance, businesses can identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in their processes. This allows for targeted improvements that enhance the overall customer experience.

By harmonizing data sources and standardizing processes into a single pane of glass, businesses can ensure consistency in information and support across different channels. This enhances trust and reliability in the brand and improves customer satisfaction and loyalty in the long run.

Real-world examples

Wells Fargo

Automation via the UiPath Platform has empowered Wells Fargo agents to dedicate more time to serving customers. By implementing automations that simplify an agent’s start-of-day tasks, research, and transaction monitoring, agents gained greater flexibility in addressing more important customer needs.

Consequently, this initiative reduced handling times and facilitated the delivery of a leading customer experience, establishing a crucial differentiator in the market.

Rajagoal Malakapalli, Head of Intelligent Automation for Consumer and Small Business Banking Technology, describes just one of the many use cases they're using today. "We had agents taking anywhere from six to seven minutes each day to set up their workspaces. We built a workspace startup automation where the agent just logs in to access their workspace with one click."

Learn more about the Wells Fargo story from the Customer Experience Summit.

Hiscox

Automation played a pivotal role in transforming Hiscox's operations, enabling the company to offer a competitive and cost-effective broker experience.

Leveraging UiPath Communications Mining, Hiscox implemented a fully automated triage capability for processing broker emails swiftly. This capability seamlessly integrated with Hiscox's existing automation solution, facilitating end-to-end request automation for the most common broker queries.

Thanks to Communications Mining, our team now spends less time on email triage and more time on the work that matters to them and their clients. We can also serve a larger number of policies without having to increase headcount.”

Guilherme Batista, Process and Operations Manager, Hiscox

Watch the replay of Hiscox's session at the AI Summit 2024.

Fiserv (Best Contact Center Innovation award winner)

Seeing a 50% reduction in average handling time, Fiserv is a believer in customer experience automation. More than 100 agents benefit from automation at Fiserv today, including Curtis, an agent at the firm.

"Before the bot came along, note taking in the system was time consuming. There was a lot of ACW [after call work] due to having to make cases for each exception. Overall, the app is a great system to work with, as it helps customers' turnaround time when it comes to processing payments and unfreezing profiles."

What's not to like? And the innovative approach to transforming the contact center was recognized with a 2024 "Best Contact Center Innovation" award from CMSWire.

Conclusion

Automation, especially when combined with AI, is reshaping the financial services industry. It's surprising customers with resolution times and experiences that exceed high expectations. Escalations are down. Customer satisfaction is up. Challenges like fragmented back-end systems are being connected through end-to-end automation, providing streamlined operations and enhanced customer interactions.

The UiPath Platform combines AI with the agility and speed of enterprise automation, machine learning, and natural language processing. That means your business doesn’t just get smarter. It means you can put that intelligence to work to streamline processes, eliminate errors, and deliver better experiences to customers and employees. Automation is the path to realizing true value from AI today...not years from now.

Examples from industry leaders like Wells Fargo, Hiscox, and Fiserv serve as compelling evidence that automation is making its mark on customer experience. Leading firms across banking, capital markets, and insurance consider automation a strategic imperative for success in delivering exceptional customer experience. And it's just one of the many ways they're using automation to stay competitive in the digital era.

Read our latest e-books to discover how AI-powered automation is transforming customer experience:

• Customer experience in banking: How AI-powered automation transforms the customer experience

• Customer experience in insurance: Putting a premium on personalized service and support

Want to discuss your specific use case? Contact us to share more details and have your questions answered.