By Rich Wang, VP, Customer Success, Observe.AI

As was the case for many industries, the pandemic accelerated the need for financial services companies to rethink their approach to customer service and support. Live phone support remains the go-to channel for critical and high-value customer interactions, and businesses are therefore looking to harness next-generation technologies like AI and natural language processing (NLP) to deliver a superior customer experience.

Here are three ways that AI-powered conversation intelligence can transform the customer experience.

Increase customer satisfaction using an empathetic approach

Conversation intelligence provides context around the “why” and “how” to improve critical metrics like CSAT and NPS. It provides a deeper understanding of the customer journey from end-to-end, providing opportunities for companies to proactively address real customer needs and provide a more personalized customer experience.

As counterintuitive as it may sound, AI can actually promote greater empathy and a more human touch to agent-customer interactions. It allows agents to zero in on how the customer is feeling using tonality-based sentiment analysis, and dig deeper into what is making the experience positive or negative. It also enables supervisors to validate whether their teams are using effective empathy statements to connect with customers, and discover why certain calls are being escalated so they can better train their team on de-escalation tactics.

Improve conversion and retention rates

The average financial services company is only able to monitor 0.05% of contact center calls using traditional manual methods. AI, however, empowers them to automatically transcribe and analyze 100% of customer interactions, and take immediate action on a range of insights to increase conversion and retention.

Using this kind of conversation intelligence, companies can better understand exactly where customers churn, which type of dialogue creates the most positive experience, and what specific factors impact agent effectiveness. For example, AI can identify opportunities for the agent to quickly identify negative customer sentiment and provide recommendations for course-correction. This rapid and specific feedback also provides personalized coaching opportunities for agents that motivate them to improve their performance.

Give customers what they need — and what they want

Last but certainly not least, conversation intelligence allows companies to make smarter, data-driven decisions across the entire organization that include, but are not limited to, better support and service.

The insights gleaned from customer interactions can help marketing teams deliver more targeted, relevant campaigns based on customer response and feedback to new offerings. It also uncovers major pain points and unmet needs for the product team to ideate around and address. It further provides sales teams with the insights they need to close more business. In short, every customer interaction becomes an opportunity to delight customers and keep them coming back while also uncovering business-improving insights that impact every function of the company.

Empowering human workers with AI

Financial services companies can hone their competitive edge by addressing customer support proactively, increasing customer satisfaction and retention, and creating products and services that continue to set the bar. AI-powered conversation intelligence empowers companies to augment the work of human agents to create a memorable, empathetic, and impactful customer experience.