Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on November 14, 2024
6 min readLast updated: January 28, 2026
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Matthew Marion, Senior Product Manager, UCaaS & CCaaS, at Windstream Enterprise
Matthew Marion, Senior Product Manager, UCaaS & CCaaS, at Windstream Enterprise
By Matthew Marion, Senior Product Manager, UCaaS & CCaaS, at Windstream Enterprise
Financial institutions operate in a world where the quality of the customer experience (CX) matters as much as the quality of a product or service itself, and customers are inclined to take their business elsewhere if interactions with their bank aren’t consistently rich, seamless across channels, and ultimately fruitful in their outcome.
It’s no surprise, then, that CX is also a strong predictor of a financial institution’s overall success. Research from McKinsey, for example, indicates that banks that excel at customer satisfaction also excel in areas like total shareholder return, increased growth, and decreased costs. What’s more, McKinsey found a positive correlation between customer satisfaction and greater wallet share, as “customers who are satisfied with their banking experiences say they will purchase more of that bank’s products.”
Therein lies the challenge. To stand out from the competition, financial institutions must find new and creative ways to elevate their customer journeys across digital channels. That’s where the latest wave of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven capabilities can help, enabling banks to curate the highly personalized, on-point customer experiences that today’s consumers expect.
That’s not always a straightforward proposition for institutions that continue to rely upon outdated, manually driven systems and processes. Indeed, as banks close more brick-and-mortar branches and place greater emphasis on digital channels to serve customers, the first critical step in upgrading the customer experience happens at the contact center level, by moving away from older, poorly integrated legacy systems, to a fully integrated multichannel contact center platform with built-in AI. Usually these platforms are available in the cloud, in the form of a contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) offering.
The combination of CCaaS and AI can help financial organizations reinvent how they interact with customers — and provide other benefits along the way, such as enhanced productivity among customer service teams, reduced infrastructure and administration costs, and greater scalability based on the needs of the business. Let’s look at a handful of areas where intelligent CCaaS capabilities are enabling financial institutions to provide better customer service, faster:
Here’s an area in which AI-powered sentiment analysis can also prove valuable by taking the temperature of an interaction (using the customer’s tonal nuances to identify sarcasm, for example), then suggesting best next actions to help an agent appease an unhappy customer. An AI copilot also can be trained to understand and use industry-specific terminology to give customers the impression they’re dealing with a subject-matter expert.
McKinsey neatly summed up the business case for financial institutions to beef up their CX when it said, “Improving customer experience creates ‘stacked wins’ of higher returns, faster growth, and lower costs.” Those wins can add up quickly for institutions that understand how to harness the power of CCaaS and AI.
Author Bio:
Matthew Marion is Senior Product Manager, UCaaS & CCaaS, at Windstream Enterprise, where he is responsible for the Windstream Enterprise xCaaS product suite, including launch, development and lifecycle management, specializing in Contact Center as a Service. He joined Windstream in 2016 and has over 12 years of experience in the telecom industry managing a wide range of voice solutions.
Customer experience (CX) refers to the overall perception a customer has of a brand based on their interactions across various touchpoints, including service, product quality, and support.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems, which can perform tasks such as learning, reasoning, and problem-solving.
Contact center as a service (CCaaS) is a cloud-based customer service solution that allows businesses to manage customer interactions across multiple channels without the need for on-premises infrastructure.
Automation in banking refers to the use of technology to perform tasks and processes without human intervention, improving efficiency and reducing operational costs.
Fraud prevention in financial services involves strategies and technologies used to detect and prevent fraudulent activities, protecting both the institution and its customers.
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