Why Voice AI/Automation Must Be Adopted by BFSI Call Centers

Voice AI/Automation has a strong foothold in today’s market. Interacting with voice platforms such as Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa, have made our lives easier. This technology has enabled us to accomplish routine tasks much faster than ever before. That’s why these platforms have been highly successful from a customer and a business perspective.

Customers expect instant gratification and personalization from every business, irrespective of the industry they function in. Businesses have to be customer-driven and not sales-driven, to fuel innovation and growth. That said, most businesses skip this approach at some point along the customer journey.

A good example of this is the service sector of the BFSI industry. We have all dreaded the idea of contacting a BFSI service team to resolve an issue. That dread stems from bad automation/experience.

Let us view two common aggravations customers face when they engage with call centers:

a. Long Hold Times: customers always want a quick resolution to their problems, this requires the undivided attention of the call center agent. when a call agent puts the customer on hold, it annoys the customer and kills the most precious commodity to them — time.

b. Inadequate Information: call center agents need to have all the answers to a customer’s issue, when they don’t possess the knowledge required to resolve the query it frustrates the end customer leading to a bad experience.

Customers hate engaging with outdated systems, they get frustrated by the experience and tend to detract.

This cycle of bad automation leading to bad experience has continued for far too long and even exists today. The resulting impact has proven to be detrimental to growth.

Why Have BFSI Call Centers Failed?

The answer to this question is partly technical and partly operational.

Slow Adopters:

The delay in the adoption of new technology has always impacted service sectors across industries, but this is more evident with contact centers. The technology they currently use is the best-automated system of the latter years, and as time progresses their system remains the same while the world has progressed further into convenience.

This delay in adoption troubles both businesses and customers. To gain a better insight, let’s look at this experience as an average customer:

When we contact support at any BFSI entity, we are ideally engaging with automated systems. The first one is a number-based dial system, that informs you about the available options. This system usually takes the customer through three or four steps before they get to the option that solves their query. sometimes the option provided may not even be the expected solution.

The second system is chatbots, wherein you engage directly with an automated system in a chat format. The issue with this system is the lack of personalization. Most chatbots are configured to resolve customer issues based on a generic approach. It presumes that the problem faced is the same for all, disregarding the point of context. When individuals are dealing with financial issues, this system can be frustrating.

This form of technological lapse results in low CSAT scores and dipping customer loyalty.

Routine Nature of Work:

Call centers are usually plagued with operational issues that reflect negatively while engaging with a customer. One such issue is as follows:

80% of call center queries are on 20% of topics covered (FAQ’s), this entails that the call centers frontline deals with repetition, causing decreased morale amongst employees. This decrease eventually leads to a high attrition rate (30% to 45% amongst mid to large call centers), which damages the entity.

Every call center invests a minimum of $5000 in hiring and training a single employee. If that employee leaves the company, the return on investment is lost.

The same investment can be utilized to implement advanced voice AI/automation technologies, which deal with repetition. Eventually side-lining the entire attrition process.

What Can BFSI Service Centers Do to Course-Correct?

The most obvious thing to do right now is to invest more in future technologies such as voice AI/automation. Most businesses with high customer satisfaction (During support engagement) have implemented this technology, to ensure high productivity internally and to have the first-mover advantage.

Voice AI/Automation:

Voice AI/Automation helps reduce human effort and error, thereby improving the efficiency of call centers. The technology is developed utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), This ensures that the technology is ubiquitous and seamless.

In simpler terms, this allows individuals to interact with machines to accomplish their tasks, may it be to play music, to book a reservation or to resolve an issue.

The benefits of this technology are speed, personalization, convenience, and accuracy.

Let’s Look at Three Ways This Technology Can Benefit BFSI Call Centers:

Reduction in Cost: The biggest advantage of utilizing this technology in support format is the reduction of cost. Most call centers currently possess large sets of human resource, they are bifurcated into teams and are expected to handle various issues. The voice AI/automated technology will help in addressing 80% of repetitive inquiries, allowing call centers to host small compact teams. This allows them to focus their efforts on resolving the 20% of customer issues that are complicated or urgent and at the same time free up training costs for other business needs.

Higher Employee Retention: Since only small teams are required in a voice automated call center, they can get to be more productive by addressing real issues, thereby lowering attrition rates. Whereas In a traditional call center, a staff member would leave after 1.5 years of service. This is mainly due to low morale and repetitive work as mentioned earlier.

First Call Resolution: When individuals contact call centers, they expect a good experience but instead are received by an outdated system that takes time to resolve their issue, this usually pushes the customer to hang up and become a detractor. With voice AI/automation platforms, they can ensure a quick response and resolution, thereby reducing the number of hang-ups. Eventually boosting CSAT scores.

These benefits play a huge role in boosting customer experience and loyalty. Loyalty plays a huge role in bringing in new prospects into the marketing cycle. One such platform that can provide these benefits to BFSI call centers is Vernacular.ai’s multilingual voice AI platform — VIVA.

VIVA is a unique service that helps accelerate your engagement strategy and utilizes cutting edge speech recognition and NLU technology. It allows your call center to provide the best engagement possible. It is an intelligent, multilingual platform that can help automate up to 80% of call center operations. With 100,000+ hours of training data, VIVA can help businesses boost customer stickiness and loyalty through a deep understanding of the customer’s context and intent.

Systems like this one can help boost customer loyalty, experience, and allow businesses to define measured engagement.

Get in touch with us to know more about how Voice AI/automation can support your business.