The Evolution of Customer Service for Financial Services:
Speech-enabling Multi-channel Customer Care

Overview

Innovation and adaptation are critical to industry leadership. As the world economy gains momentum in its long-delayed recovery, retail banks are reinventing themselves as flexible, dynamic sales organizations at the front end, and efficient, low-cost processors at the back end. Driving this reinvention is intense local and global competition. The key to staying ahead lies in leveraging all available customer relationship management mechanisms — in order to ensure that retail banking customers can get what they need when they need it, while ensuring that banking operations have real-time, relevant access to information about customers and critical operations across the enterprise.

What can today's converged, web-voice solutions do to help your financial services organization realize the aforementioned goals and objectives? Just ask yourself the following questions: When customers dial in to your call center, use your ATM network, log on to your online banking system, or visit a branch office, are you able to serve them consistently regardless of method of interaction? Is all pertinent and appropriate information available at the precise moment of customer interaction? Can you spot the ideal moment to offer your customer the equity line or debit card that would make them a more profitable customer? In short, are you optimizing every interaction with every customer? Most likely, the information and processes required for this type of service and highly effective selling already exist in your retail banking enterprise; however, they may not be working optimally. By identifying, integrating, and leveraging these processes in real time at the point of customer interaction, you can convert them into a profit engine. You can also differentiate your customer interaction from the competition by offering state of the art speech interfaces that are not only easy to use for your customers, but also easy to maintain, and that leverage many of the web-based assets that you have invested in today.

This is precisely the power that today's open-standards based voice systems bring to retail banking. As banks look for ways to achieve higher profits through customer service and sales, they need to integrate customer service systems, tie them to a variety of back-office systems, and supply them with consistent information. A state-of-the-art voice system based upon the Microsoft .NET Framework makes this possible by enhancing payment and financial data with real-time, comprehensive, cross-channel information to enable personalized service to each customer as a "market of one." In fact, this solution delivers critical customer and business information to all parts of the enterprise — immediately and consistently. The solution integrates core systems, data warehouses and delivery channels in real time, driving unprecedented levels of integration, performance, and manageability. It complements and adds value to your existing IT investment. And because this solution is built to scale up and out, you can be assured that solution will be able to grow with you and your customers.

Business challenges and opportunities

Every year, retail banking customers engage in more than 200 billion interactions with their financial institutions. Each interaction has the potential to either create value and strengthen the customer relationship or leave customers feeling frustrated and dissatisfied. The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index suggests that the latter scenario too often prevails: At the end of 2004, customer satisfaction for the top four U.S. banks was rated at a score of 71 (out of a possible 100), lower than the scores achieved by department stores, supermarkets, and insurance companies. A major contributor to these low scores is the lack of an integrated customer view, resulting from an infrastructure that is incapable of delivering such a view. The problem of multiple core systems complicated by a growing number of disparate delivery channels makes finding a solution even that much more challenging. These systems were developed individually using state-of-the-art toolsets, specialized development skills, and proprietary data models. As a result, they have widely varying integration requirements, data structures and availability guidelines. And no single channel has complete access to an up-to-date, consolidated view of critical customer and business data. The "many-to-many" connections between back-office systems and front-office delivery channels create an enterprise infrastructure that is complex, expensive and incapable of delivering a single view of the customer from the bank's perspective or a single view of the bank from the customer's perspective. In fact, the existing technology within the average banking institution makes it virtually impossible to create this unified view. In an attempt to improve customer satisfaction, financial institutions have spent billions of dollars on customer-focused products and services, as well as on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects. These efforts were implemented as internally-facing, data-driven systems and have been hampered by a lack of consistency in delivering the information to the customer when it really counts: at the exact point and time of interaction. Leading banks seek to create an environment in which customers are treated consistently at every point of interaction, and in which the bank can leverage up-to-the-second information to capitalize on sales and marketing opportunities. Only with multiple customer access channels, and real-time access to customer data, can banks maintain and advance profitable relationships with their customers.

Industry trends

Across the financial services spectrum, whether in retail banking, wholesale banking, or the securities environment, enterprises are facing a growing list of challenges. Continued pressure on interest margins makes the need for efficiency greater. Customer service, retention and loyalty depend on the regular rollout of new products, services (including value-added advisory services) and payment mechanisms. And a single view of the customer, whether corporate or individual, is needed to achieve real-time decision-making capabilities and to deliver new service levels. A virtual avalanche of compliance, regulatory and industry mandates, such as anti-money laundering, the USA Patriot Act, SWIFTNet and Basel II, is descending on the industry. The "do more with less" paradigm that characterizes 21st century business requires an even stronger focus on operational efficiency, accompanied by greater emphasis on cost reduction and improved return on IT investment. Consolidation in the financial services industry will continue, fueled by the desire to move into new markets and products, integrate distribution channels and lower costs through greater economies of scale.

Technology trends

The TowerGroup, a leading research and advisory firm focused on technology in the global financial services industry, projects that worldwide IT spending will grow at the rate of 3.3 percent per year going forward. This projection is based on a broad agreement that technology is a primary enabler for the development of new, customer-centric features and services. Legacy systems lack the flexibility needed to integrate data across internal and external environments in real time and leverage it for informed business decisions. An increasing number of financial institutions are pursuing open platforms for more efficient standardization, greater modularity, faster application development and lower total cost of ownership.

Investment protection

Infrastructure replacement is not an option in today's retail banking environment — a result of the enormous investment in legacy core banking and delivery channel systems. Current technology solutions include some level of channel integration. However, banks must replace existing platforms to take advantage of their enhanced integration capabilities. For effective branch, call center, voice-response, kiosk, and online banking integration without a central hub, all three systems would need to be replaced with a single solution. And the provider of such a solution may not have the necessary experience in all of these areas to provide a scalable, reliable multi-channel delivery system. The way this can be done successfully is through the deployment of a reusable framework.

Open-standards for converged web/voice solutions have made the reusable framework concept a reality for financial services organizations. Based on more than a quarter century of financial industry experience in traditional voice-enabled customer relationship management systems and real-time transaction processing, Intervoice and Microsoft have created solutions for the financial services contact center. These solutions have their roots in core Intervoice and Microsoft service and technology components such as Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Speech Server, Microsoft Active Directory, Intervoice Telephony Interface Manager (SIP & TDM), and the Intervoice Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Server. A typical solution framework depicting how voice-enabled technologies can be incorporated into today's financial services contact center is depicted in the Figure 1 below:

This architectural framework can enable a financial institution to enhance payments and financial data with real-time, comprehensive, cross-channel information to serve each customer as a "market of one." By integrating and not rebuilding best-in-class front-office solutions, today's voice solutions protect the bank's investment in individual delivery channels while giving your customers a competitively different customer service experience through speech-driven voice self service. What's more, this solution gives the bank the flexibility to leverage existing infrastructure investments — IT Human Resources, desktop and server licenses, legacy CRM systems like Oracle and SAP, online access methods, CTI software, existing switching fabric and more!

Capabilities and benefits

Intervoice Solutions for Microsoft Speech Server for retail banking deliver an up-to-the-second, consolidated view of all payment and customer related data — enabling financial institutions to optimize every customer interaction. The solution addresses major business challenges, including the need to reduce costs, increase revenue and profitability, improve customer service, respond quickly to changing market dynamics, and leverage existing investments.

Key benefits include:

Summary

The growth of e-business of over the past several years has led to an explosion in the number of interactions a financial services organization has with its customers. A company must plan for interactions not only through a contact center, but also through multiple touch points including the Web, mobile phones, Pocket PCs, and e-mail. Financial services companies that have successfully deployed self-service options for customers continually look for ways to improve and integrate these services to reduce the total cost of ownership, increase profitability, increase customer satisfaction, retain customers, and uncover new revenue opportunities. Key contact center solutions that can help you further enhance self-service capabilities and realize these benefits can be achieved through Intervoice Solutions for Microsoft Speech Server.

Designed and certified for Microsoft Windows, Intervoice Solutions for Microsoft Speech Server facilitate a new age of integration and collaboration between the retail banking consumer and the financial enterprise. By leveraging the power of Microsoft Windows and .NET technologies, these solutions allow you to "close the loop" between your customer care strategies and the technology already in your customers' hands.

Intervoice Solutions for Microsoft Speech Server offer an efficient and effective path for any business that seeks to deploy speech-enabled technology as well as a centralized integration framework to take advantage of all other customer touch points in their organization. Our solutions deliver extraordinary ROI potential by providing highly integrated, efficient, speech-enabled, self-service capabilities for enterprise financial services organizations at an economical price. Future business needs are met by a flexible technology that provides multiple deployment options through a highly scalable and integrated architecture built on the .NET Framework. In fact, the ability to manage one .NET code base for both Web- and voice-enabled applications makes it possible to extend new and ubiquitous self-service capabilities to retail banking customers — ultimately enabling you to balance enterprise and customer goals through an optimized customer experience. Let Intervoice show your financial institution how to optimize its technology investments to succeed in today's challenging environment. For more information visit us at www.intervoice.com/solutions/microsoft-solutions.

Author Profile:
Michael Segura is responsible for strategy, product, and market development of Microsoft products for Intervoice. Segura has 15 years of experience managing business units within the telecommunications, energy and consulting industries. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Texas A&M University and has completed Executive Marketing Management Program from Duke University and University of North Carolina. Segura also holds a CPA certification.