e-book

Augmenting the
Contact Center for
Better Banking CX
 introduction

This is a pivotal time for the contact center. As offices and bank branches remain temporarily
closed, shut down permanently, or begin to reopen with new health safety protocols, customer
service and support operations are experiencing larger volumes of incoming requests, while their
contact centers operate at reduced capacities.

While enabling work-at-home agents has been the first priority, it comes with an urgency to handle
the surge in call volume from offset branch traffic. Nearly a quarter (24 percent) of customers
are less likely to use their bank’s branch offices. And many customer service organizations
continue to struggle developing a coordinated approach to offload request volume to digital and
self-service channels.

What’s inside

• The alternative to rip-and-replace

• Augment the connectivity to never miss a customer inquiry

• Augment self-service with intelligence

• Augment the customer and agent experience with proactive communications

• Augmenting service channels with APIs

 Going forward, one in three consumers expect to use digital channels more
frequently. This reinforces the imperative for banks to reimagine their channels
boldly, anchored in an integrated vision for distribution. Gartner believes that,
by 2023, more than 60 percent of all customer service engagements will be
delivered via digital and web self-serve channels, up from 23 percent in 2019.

COVID-19’s impact on consumer preference for digital channels

The pandemic has made me more likely to use :

27% 26%
online mobile
bank’s
payment
website
apps
23%
bank’s mobile
app

covid-19’s impact on consumer preference for digital channels 3

 The alternative to
rip-and-replace
Most banks today run on legacy, first-generation product and servicing platforms
that were never designed with our digital age in mind. These platforms simply do
not have the agility and flexibility to rapidly innovate, launch new products in the
marketplace, and support the ever-changing regulatory requirements and demands
for data protection and privacy. They often cannot scale up to accommodate the
increase in digital transaction volumes. Batch processing makes it difficult to
enable contextual experiences based on real-time data.

Augmentation is the strategy

to modernize a contact center
without ripping and replacing.
With traditional vendors, adding
one feature to a contact center
By 2023, more than

60%
requires upgrading their contact
center platform. With cloud-
enabled contact center capabilities,
companies can move at their own of all customer service
pace, building upon their existing engagements will be
infrastructure. In contrast, legacy delivered via digital and
contact center vendors limit a web self-serve channels,
business’ ability to expand its up from 23 percent in 2019.
customer service globally—it
requires additional hardware and
software.

covid-19’s impact on consumer preference for digital channels 4

 Augment the connectivity to
never miss a customer inquiry
Reliable connectivity is the foundation of any contact center. Even though the
technology to have remote contact center agents has existed for over 15 years,
organizations were still not prepared to support remote customer service agents
for the pandemic. Making the transition from legacy on-premise telephony systems
to scalable cloud-based contact centers requires a reliable internet connection
at agents’ homes, a monitoring and tracking system to support this connectivity,
visibility for supervisors, and skills-based routing. First and foremost, enabling a
remote contact center means having the right connectivity to support it—namely,
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

SIP Trunking can be used to connect your business to an Internet Telephony

Service Provider (ITSP) through a direct connection. The SIP protocol allows
transmission of voice, video, and messaging data over the internet by converting
them into packets of data. All you need for SIP is sufficient broadband internet
bandwidth, which means contact centers can operate virtually from anywhere
without the need for investing in a physical office space or building.

covid-19’s impact on consumer preference for digital channels 5

 A SIP signal is controlled like data, so phone numbers are not determined by the
location of equipment. With SIP, your company can have two or more predetermined
IP addresses or phone numbers to failover incoming calls to.

Route incoming calls to your contact center server to agents working on-site and
agents working remotely:

Contact Center
Agents SIP Server

PSTN
Outbound SIP Trunk

PBX Inbound Phone Number

PSTN
SBC Provider

Media Servers

SIP works with existing phone systems, plus it can be used to integrate new
technologies into your communications suite.

covid-19’s impact on consumer preference for digital channels 6

 Augment self-service
with intelligence
According to recent Gartner research, customer effort is 40 percent more accurate
at predicting customer loyalty than customer satisfaction. Customer effort is the
ease of customer interaction and resolution during a request.

Online chat is the second most preferred channel for customer service, yet adoption
is low among financial services companies. Gartner research shows that only 35
percent of retail banking, 31 percent of insurance, and just 9 percent of wealth and
asset management companies analyzed offer live chat or a chatbot on the public site.

Combining online chat with other self-service options such as searchable FAQs
can reduce volumes an estimated 20-40 percent. After implementing a virtual
customer assistant (VCA), for example, organizations report a reduction of up to
70 percent in call, chat and/or email inquiries, and 33 percent savings per voice
engagement.
For customer inquiries made through

40%
a call, an interactive voice response
(IVR) system equipped with artificial
intelligence (AI) can recognize a
more accurate at
customer’s intent to provide answers,
understanding requests that aren’t a part predicting customer loyalty
of a predetermined menu of options. By than customer satisfaction.
2023, 30 percent of customer service

covid-19’s impact on consumer preference for digital channels 7

 organizations will deliver proactive customer service using artificial intelligence,
process orchestration, and continuous intelligence.

IVR with AI can also intelligently route calls to reduce handling time, or give callers
the option of receiving either a callback, switch to chat, or SMS message from the
next available agent, rather than wait. Similarly, AI-based chatbots, which have
natural language understanding capabilities, can complete more complex tasks to
reduce escalation to a live agent.

Today, companies have a number of platforms to choose from to provide the APIs,
infrastructure, and tools needed to build intelligent bots. These platforms are
commonly referred to as conversational AI platforms, and let you focus on building
a bot experience that works for your users without worrying about the underlying
capabilities or infrastructure.

covid-19’s impact on consumer preference for digital channels 8

 Augment the customer
and agent experience with
proactive communications
At this critical time, bank customers have an urgency for proactive guidance,
assurance, and real-time responses via account-related alerts and notifications,
and remote customer service. Nearly one in five financial services organizations
used remote contact centers for the first time as a result of COVID-19.
Video is the next best thing to in-person servicing and is especially useful for
building trust and retaining customers who are accustomed to receiving high-
touch customer service. In a time where it’s easier than ever to switch your
primary bank, video helps to solve issues faster than sending multiple messages
and offers a more personalized experience.

Push notifications are a form of one-way communication that can provide useful
information while also directing users to your app. In contrast to SMS, Apple and
Google don’t charge an underlying cost for receiving push notifications on their
iOS and Android operating systems. These messages do not require a particular
application to be open on a device for the message to be received by the end-user,
so a smartphone user can see notifications even when their phone is locked, or
when an app is not running. People who opt into an app’s push notifications are
about 3x more likely to open an app than those who opt out.

covid-19’s impact on consumer preference for digital channels 9

 Transactional SMS messaging, triggered by a user’s action, prompts an
immediate message alert. Automated SMS replies are typically used for
transaction alerts, or acknowledgment of a customer opting-in to receive text
messages from your organization.

While the majority of messages sent

to consumers from businesses today
are still one-way, consumers are
increasingly looking for the ability
to reply back. Banks are increasingly

90%
offering text banking, via SMS, for
customers to quickly request and
receive their account information.
Ninety percent of SMS messages are of SMS messages are read
read within three minutes with a 45 within three minutes with a
percent response rate—the highest 45 percent response rate.
of any channel available today.

covid-19’s impact on consumer preference for digital channels 10

 conclusion

Augmenting service
channels with APIs
The challenging economic environment is an opportunity for financial services to
reinvent how they connect with their customers. Application platforms empower
financial services companies to develop and embed scalable customer engagement
channels for remote service, omnichannel communications, and digital journeys.
This technology offers greater flexibility to adapt communications capabilities as
business needs and customer preferences change.

Cloud APIs—or, the routines, protocols, and tools developers use for building
software applications—offer new approaches to building contact centers that do
not require expensive systems integration or a ‘rip and replace’ rebuild. Instead,
APIs provide the flexibility to augment iteratively and to create a better customer
experience, feature by feature.
 Learn more
about transforming
your contact center

Talk to an expert

© 2020 Twilio