Elizabeth Tobey, Head of Marketing, FluenCX, NICE

Achieving customer trust is a top priority for banks in the new digital era. Trust is the foundation of a bank’s relationship with its customers, and it is this trust which gives banks access to customers’ most personal information: their data, financial information, and livelihood. As a result of growing consumer expectations, banks have had to reimagine their approach to customer experience to continue winning their customers’ loyalty.

Today’s consumers expect instant gratification and are fearless in moving to another bank if their needs are not met. As a result, it’s more important than ever for brands to meet their customers wherever they are in their journey, on any touchpoint, and at every time. A key component of this new market standard is CXi, customer experience interactions. CXi means using data and analytics to make a business more intelligent and effective across its customers’ journeys for agent and agentless interactions.

To master CXi, financial institutions including the nation’s fifth-largest bank, U.S. Bank, have increased investments in agent experience powered by A.I., intelligent self-service, and digital entry points. When deployed correctly and holistically, a CXi-focused contact center helps businesses optimize their operations, improve response time, and drive customer retention, loyalty, and trust.

Taking a Digital-First Approach

To build trust in its customer service operations, U.S. Bank needed to understand and improve its overall service quality. Moreover, their new solution had to be scalable – U.S. Bank operates 12 different domestic contact centers that employ more than 4,000 agents to serve their growing customer base. In all, the company handles around 55 million customer interactions annually.

After reviewing their current operations, U.S. Bank realized they were only capturing roughly 20-25% of interaction data, stunting progress, and missing out entirely on actionable data and insights that could inform changes in strategy and operational improvements. Moreover, interaction data, performance reviews, and coaching plans were sorted and evaluated manually. That meant valuable insights were being missed, preventing the business from uncovering further operational and staffing challenges and, as a result, hindering growth and improvement opportunities.

“We needed a net with much more intricate webbing,” Jason Bettini, U.S. Bank’s Customer Analytics Leader said, “to help us capture the other 80% of interactions that were getting away.” He continued, “Interaction Analytics became our large, intricately webbed net.”

U.S. Bank concluded that the key to building customer trust was a digital, omnichannel, CXi-fluent contact center built from foundational, comprehensive interaction capture. U.S. Bank chose NICE Interaction Analytics, focusing on omnichannel capabilities and text- and speech-based sentiment to create a truly digital, intelligent contact center. Other benefits of this platform was its ability to generate advanced data reports to help give the bank insight into ongoing pain points, trends in interaction data across phone, text, social, email, and more, as well as personnel and staffing challenges, including the effects of employee churn.

By holistically capturing this data and drawing insights, the deployment of NICE Interaction Analytics bridged the gaps in U.S. Bank’s understanding of its customers’ experience and ways to foster improvements, beginning with average handle time (AHT), call avoidance, volume reduction, and dead air root cause. According to U.S. Bank, since the deployment began, it has improved service levels and overall experience drastically and increased the number of customers served.

Adopting NICE technology has improved U.S. Bank’s bottom line as well. An example of this is the bank has seen increased savings by optimizing operations across the organizations, including $65,000 saved with optimized agent service and $18,000 saved with optimized fraud-prevention adherence, all over 90 days.

According to US Bank, another example of the improvements they are seeing is additional dollars were saved through a lower AHT, reducing lengthy calls and “dead air ” periods of silence hold times accrued throughout a call. Even more so, U.S. Bank projects a total increase of $2.6 million saved across their enterprise – a massive consideration as many organizations, including banks, are faced with recession fears and looming layoffs to better balance their businesses.

A Smarter, Secure Path Forward

When customers have a problem, they expect it to be solved in a fast, seamless experience on the digital touchpoint of their choosing. For U.S. Bank to achieve this, that meant rapidly implementing a solution with comprehensive interaction capture that also provides insights from deep-dive analytics with easy-to-use interactivity.

By prioritizing data at the heart of everything they do, U.S. Bank has improved its CX through various self-service and agent-assisted channels. Similarly, agents feel empowered to provide meaningful customer experience through enhanced agent training and coaching. Altogether, U.S. Bank’s data-driven solution has taken its CX to the next level, building a model that customers can trust to carry them into the digital future.