Case Study – How financial institutions are successfully navigating operational challenges during mergers & migrations with interface.ai’s AI-Powered Phone Banking

There have been a few significant trends in the financial industry over the past several years. One such trend is consolidation among Credit Unions and Community Banks. For instance, there were nearly 24k Credit Unions in the United States at the peak of the Credit Union movement; this has since dropped to just over 5100 Credit Unions today, and a similar pattern is observed among community banks. The pandemic & the resulting financial environment are expected to increase the instances of consolidation. Larger financial institutions are looking to build scale, and smaller financial institutions with less than $100M in assets are expected to be forced into an acquisition due to their poor financial conditions.

Another prominent trend is the focus on digital, where financial institutions are investing heavily to make their digital channels robust and modern. The pandemic’s onset has accelerated the shift of customers towards digital platforms and has made these platforms the ‘go-to’ place for customers to interact with their financial institution. This shift in customer behavior has led to a large-scale digital transformation effort from financial institutions. To be more digitally savvy, financial institutions are migrating to a more open core banking system, a more modern online banking platform, and cloud-based contact center systems.

Such transformations mean a lot of change for both the customers and the staff of these financial institutions.

For instance, when two entities combine during a merger, the resulting entity will need to be on a single online banking platform. There is a need for new IDs to be created for customers to transition to the new platform. In the case of core migration or migration to any new tool, the same process follows, with there being a need to create a new identity for customers who are new to this platform or tool.

Any change described above or a combination of these changes will trigger a significant spike in call volumes as customers seek information and clarifications. This issue is exacerbated with access to branches restricted today due to the pandemic.

Financial institutions experience anywhere between a 5-fold to a 25-fold increase in inquiries & call volumes during such transitions. This leads to severe operational strain on the support function because of the increased call volumes, and the support staff are not equipped and trained with the new knowledge necessary to respond to these inquiries. This leads to increased call wait times, increased call abandonment rates, increased average handling times(AHT), low first-time resolutions, and overall a poor customer experience.

Creating seamless access to on-demand knowledge for both employees and customers about the changes is necessary while navigating a change.

How are financial institutions trying to accomplish this?

Today, financial institutions have attempted to create self-serve content through videos, blogs, or FAQs that help customers and employees acquire the necessary knowledge on the changes. However, customers seek instant gratification and do not have the patience to go through such content, remember it and apply it at the time of need. Even employees will not have sufficient time to imbibe this knowledge leading to errors and fewer resolution instances.

What is necessary is providing instant access to knowledge for customers and employees, and the best way to achieve this is through Artificial Intelligence.

With interface.ai’s Artificial Intelligence-powered Phone Banking, Financial institutions can –

• Automate high-frequency calls & instantly respond to customer inquiries
• Increase the automation scope as the AI-powered Phone Banking will continue to learn every week on questions it could not answer.
• Instantly scale to handle any volume of calls.

As the AI-powered Phone Banking acts as the first line of defense and handles most of the customers’ calls, the volume of calls arriving at the financial institution’s call center drastically reduces, thus reducing the stress on the call center.

Suppose the AI-powered Phone Banking is unable to respond to any questions from the customer. In that case, the Artificial Intelligence-powered frontline assistant equips the staff with the apt policy and procedure to respond to the question swiftly.

With such a setup, financial institutions can dramatically reduce the stress on financial institutions’ support function.

The AI-powered Phone Banking ensures there are no call wait times for customers, no calls from customers are abandoned, reduced average handling time, and provides an increase in first-time resolution instances.

Responses from interface.ai’s AI-powered Phone Banking are highly accurate & comparable to the quality of answers from the high-performing staff in any financial institution. With the AI-powered Phone Banking being equipped with neural voice, customers are also guaranteed a human-like support experience on the call center.

interface.ai’s AI-powered Phone Banking that can answer all questions related to a merger or a migration could be set up in less than 2 weeks, and a front-line assistant can be set up in about 4 to 6 weeks. With interface.ai’s managed services, 95% of the work on this implementation will be handled by interface.ai. In many cases, it is an out-of-the-box installation as interface.ai already has workflows for all the popular systems in the industry.

Within a few weeks after the launch, the AI-powered Phone Banking will handle over 90% of customers’ questions on mergers & migrations.

The AI-powered Phone Banking is an omnichannel solution that can be set up in the form of a chat or voice-based solution.