By Diana Bersohn, Jeffrey Johnson, Stefano Trombetta and James Vogtle

Yesterday's customer service agent... tomorrow's empathetic advisorThe digital banking relationship center of the future

Forget annoying call routing systems, frustrating call transfers and impersonal service. Imagine personalized remote customer experiences and human advisors that anticipate a customer’s needs—personal, simple and seamless. Say goodbye to the banking contact center as we know it, and hello to the digital banking relationship center of the future.

Digital disruption is redefining the retail experience, but banking contact centers are not harnessing this disruption fast enough. With more than 70 percent of banks' customer interactions going through digital channels, the contact center must adapt to play a new role.1

How do banks build the workforce of the future to deliver a digital relationship center that drives growth and delights customers?

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Fifty-eight percent of all business to consumer organizations (B2C) surveyed for Accenture are taking actions to improve the customer cross-channel experience.2 This trend aligns with market shifts in banking. Customers, especially millennials and younger digital natives, are not tied to the branch like they once were. They bank across physical and digital channels of choice and expect common and customized experiences among them.

The banking contact center is ideally positioned to become the core of vital customer interactions as branch networks shrink and branches are increasingly used for exceptions rather than standard transactions. This transition cannot succeed without a significant overhaul. Banking contact centers must transform from being the channel of last resort into revenue growth centers by driving loyalty and creating personalized customer experiences.

To do this, the contact center must move beyond merely processing customer inquiries to building customer relationships. Success demands more than just transforming to digital. It requires a new talent strategy and an integrated platform approach. Customer service agents become empathetic advisors who provide hyper-personalized service facilitated by intelligent machines producing data insights from platforms. It is the future of work—and the secret to highly differentiated services, loyal customers, improved revenue and a more empowered workforce of the future.

Channel of last resort becomes relationship center

of B2C organizations are taking actions to improve the customer cross-channel experience

58%

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Empathetic advisors: The heart of the contact center

Banks now compete on customer experience as much as, if not more than, on product selection and price. They are under pressure to match the high bar that Amazon and other customer experience leaders set for “know me, serve me, delight me” experiences.

Twenty-nine percent of consumers use the banking contact center today, and 18 percent rely on it for their first contact.3 While first contact usage is likely to decline due to the switch to digital, the importance of contact center interactions will increase as the only source of human interaction with a growing customer base.

Yet there is a disconnect between what banks have traditionally focused on in contact centers and what customers value. Banks want efficiency. Customers want trustworthiness (56 percent), high-quality customer service (55 percent), and a skilled workforce aware of their needs (55 percent)—the top three customer satisfaction drivers in retail banking.4

of consumers use the banking contact center today and 18 percent rely on it for their first contact

29%

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Banking contact centers need a new talent strategy to bridge this gap. Workers need different skills: problem solving, analytical thinking, sales and communications. Above all, they need to show empathy from the time customers connect with the interactive voice response (IVR) system through issue resolution and discussion of new opportunities.

This is the ability to see the world through customers’ eyes to understand the personal context of people’s financial needs. It is about solving problems by serving customers as individuals, not as numbers in an inbound call, video or mobile chat queue.

Spain’s banking group BBVA Contigo program focuses on providing “the human touch” to customers who typically bank using digital channels. Customers can sign up for their own personal advisor who provides services such as investment advice, credit card sign-up and loan applications. It is personalized virtual service from a real person without ever stepping inside the branch.5 Programs like this emphasize the importance of soft skills even in a hard numbers business.

The “we treat you like you’d treat you” ad campaign for the Discover it® card brings the empathetic advisor to life.6 When customers call the contact center, employees who answer look exactly like the customer and anticipate callers’ needs. The message behind the laughs is that the company understands the importance of connecting with customers in a personalized and relevant way.

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In addition to a talent strategy that cultivates empathy, banks need the underlying technology platforms that enable them to deliver distinct customer experiences. Eighty-three percent of banking executives see platforms as the glue that will bind their organizations in the digital economy.7

Banks have work to do here. Silos are ubiquitous in their business and in their technology architectures. Working across these silos is cumbersome at best, impossible at worst. Customer experiences suffer as a result. Workers cannot empathize with customers because of legacy system blind spots, piecemeal data and knowledge gaps. Trained in one product line, workers cannot pursue lines of inquiry that extend customer conversations—and sales.

With a platform strategy, banks can break through the silos and deliver personalized customer experiences. Platforms empower banks with a comprehensive view of the customer based on analysis of data from across the enterprise as well as, potentially, external sources. Data insight enables banking relationship centers to employ analytically-driven smart routing, contextualize customer interactions and expand the bank’s omni-channel capabilities.

Platforms: The contact center’s missing link

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This is the future of work in the digital banking relationship center—virtual service that rivals human-to-human branch interactions. This scenario will not happen tomorrow, but it is coming. After all, millennials tend to value personalized experiences over privacy, and Gen Z consumers will likely follow in their footsteps. In North America, banks are by far the most trusted service provider in terms of safeguarding customers’ personal data, but banks must evolve how they use their vast amounts of data to deliver highly relevant experiences and advice.8

Compare two customer contact center interactions:

Today, Mary calls her bank’s contact center to inquire about raising her credit card limit. Mary spends twenty minutes on the phone with a representative. She then asks about setting up auto payment for her mortgage payment. The representative puts her on hold to transfer her call. Mary cannot wait, and hangs up.

Fast forward to the platform world. Bill the advisor knows Mary. She has opted-in for automated analysis of her social media posts. This identifies an upcoming vacation to celebrate her daughter’s graduation. Bill texts Mary and they schedule a video chat. Bill extends Mary’s credit card limit, offers travel discounts and suggests a low interest rate credit card for her daughter. Mary asks about setting up an auto payment for her mortgage, which Bill quickly arranges.

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Working alongside humans in the digital banking relationship center, intelligent machines and other types of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will transform everyone’s experience—remaking the future of service and the future of work. Seventy-seven percent expect AI to be a significant change or complete transformation for banking over the next three years. Also, eighty-six percent agree that the widespread use of AI delivers competitive advantage beyond cost.9

The human and machine story is not an us-versus-them tale. Intelligent machines are essential to the future contact center workforce because of complementary capabilities. With advanced analytics, they will arm advisors with invaluable insights from internal platform data and ancillary data from external sources, such as social media that can provide insights about customer habits and preferences.

Intelligent machines also augment the human workforce in areas such as emotional intelligence. These self-learning machines can recognize and translate tone, emotions and expressions to empathize with customers and address their needs. One global credit card company is employing sensing technology as part of its IVR system that can quickly identify and escalate a frustrated customer to a human advisor.

Robots: The newest contact center recruits

of executives expect AI to be a significant change or complete transformation for banking over the next three years.

77%

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78%

Retail banks are accelerating adoption of these advanced capabilities. Banks are investing in intelligent technologies that go beyond cost reduction—they will drive transformation for workers and customers alike. According to Accenture research, banking organizations increased their spending from 2013 to 2015 in areas like tonal recognition and natural language processing (69 percent), embedded AI solutions that auto-adjust to users’ needs (77 percent), and predictive capabilities including deep learning (78 percent).10

of banking organizations increased their spending in deeply predictive capabilities from 2013 to 2015

Rabobank introduced an automated chat service through its user experience lab in the Netherlands. Customers responded positively to the service. However, many were only comfortable using the webcam for emotion recognition if a human advisor was on the line too.11 This reaction signals the mutual dependence of human and machine in the banking relationship center.

78%

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Building the future of work

The relationship center has exciting potential to be the command center of the digital banking customer experience. Banks can create momentum for change by taking three fundamental steps:

Reimagine the workforce. Banks must recalibrate their talent strategy. This starts with determining the gap between current and future skills—problem solving, analytical thinking, sales, interpersonal and communications skills—and developing a talent strategy to close it. This talent strategy must move away from a binary view of human and robot work and account for the evolution of humans and machines working together. Banks will not have the choice of using one or the other. A workforce that integrates man and machine demands an integrated talent strategy.

Break free from rigid architectures. Banks must rethink their legacy business and technology architectures. This can be challenging due to an acquisitions and consolidation climate that has left complex infrastructures in its wake. Even so, banks can make headway by decoupling the architectures so that the data layer is exposed, not buried within inflexible systems. This is a technology modernization initiative that can be done in multiple steps. Quick wins include linking checking account and credit card information for more visibility into customers’ purchase patterns and the ability for one employee to help a customer across products.

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Rethink what success looks like. With the right talent strategy and supporting platform, banks must then adapt traditional contact center metrics. Instead of measuring compliance, churn and efficiency, banks must quantify, evaluate and reward empathy, customer experience quality, continuous improvement and revenue creation. The key is to move from operating like a factory with production pressure to making customer experience a strategic imperative.

From contact center to relationship center

Becoming a digital bank means infusing digital into every facet of the institution. The digital banking relationship center is at the heart of it all. It is the place where tomorrow’s banking customer relationships thrive and grow—where the strategic combination of human empathetic advisors, platforms and intelligent automation forever change the future of work.

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Contact the authorsDiana Bersohn San Francisco, California diana.bersohn@accenture.com

Jeff Johnson Boston, Massachusetts jeffrey.a.johnson@accenture.com

Stefano Trombetta Rome, Italy stefano.trombetta@accenture.com

James Vogtle Toronto, Canada james.vogtle@accenture.com

ContributorsPhilip Davis San Francisco, California philip.a.davis@accenture.com

McCree Lake Atlanta, Georgia mccree.lake@accenture.com

Notes1 “Community Banking”, Wells Fargo Company,

May 24, 2016.

2 Digital Transformation In The Age Of The Customer: B2C, A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By Accenture Interactive, 2016.

3 Global Consumer Pulse Research: Banking and Financial Services Providers, Accenture Strategy, 2015.

4 Ibid

This document makes descriptive reference to trademarks that may be owned by others. The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such trademarks by Accenture and is not intended to represent or imply the existence of an association between Accenture and the lawful owners of such trademarks.

16-2223

5 Patrick Blum, “BBVA launches a new management and advice service for clients,” November 24, 2011, retrieved on June 8, 2016 at http://www.investmenteurope.net/regions/spainportugal/bbva-launches-a-new-management-and-advice-service-for-clients/

6 https://www.youtube.com/user/Discover

7 Accenture Technology Vision Study, 2016.

8 Accenture Technology Vision for Banking: Digital Trust: Erase the trust paradox in banking, 2016.

9 Accenture Technology Vision Study, 2016.

10 Ibid

11 Rabobank, “Rabobank: A future robot bank?,” retrieved on June 8, 2016 at https://www.rabobank.com/en/about-rabobank/customer-focus/innovation/tech-trends/articles/rabobank-a-future-robot-bank.html

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