Unlock Productivity: Empower Frontline Staff with Virtual Assistants to do more with less

The frontline staff at banks and credit unions constitute almost 80% of the workforce. They are the first ones or possibly the only ones to interact with the customers face-to-face. They are in several ways the brand ambassadors, who impact the brand image through the customer experience.

Moreover, with changes in technology, consumer preference, and on-demand services credit unions have innovated the way members obtain services at branch. For example, there is no longer a teller, now we have the universal associate methodology, where the frontline employees have the breadth of knowledge to serve members on all the different products and services.

This type of open design has already seen some success. The customer does not have to move from one employee to another to resolve issues thus improving the service quality and wait time.

However, this method has brought on a new set of problems for credit unions.

1. Recruiting staff with a different skillset
2. Retraining and upskill the current talent pool to meet the new service standards
3. Dependence on fragmented legacy systems, making it difficult for staff to find customer information in a single place

Virtual assistants can be used to tackle all 3 problems simultaneously in a way that empowers the frontline staff.

Also Read: 4 levels of chatbots in banking

Virtual assistants can be customized to act as an assistant to the employees. By empowering the employees with an assistant that can answer all their question across all products, the credit unions can dynamically change the way frontline employees work and provide services to the customers. This will also ensure consistency in the replies given to customers as the answers will come from a single knowledge source.

Virtual assistants can be customized in a way that they can access information across fragmented systems including legacy systems like core banking, loan origination, wealth management, and credit cards searchable using NLP and machine learning. The frontline staff will be able to search for information on almost any topic without having any prior knowledge about it and come across as an expert.

The staff will be empowered by the virtual assistant to do the same work in a faster, quicker and easier manner. They will be able to spend more time trying to solve customer queries or working on selling products and services rather than looking up information.

Virtual assistant is a powerful technology that can have a multiplicative effect on the top-line and bottom-line of the credit union depending on where it is being implemented. As an employee assistant, it allows credit unions to do more with fewer resources and allows the staff to use their time productively.

Also Read: How AI digital assistants can increase employee engagement in Contact centers