How to improve agent productivity in financial services? Naturally, AI will be helpful with that – you can use it to both install self-service bots that will deal with the simplest tickets or use AI assistants that will accelerate the work of your agents. To add to that, you should ensure real-time communication between the agents and their team leaders and optimise task management for the most efficiency. Finally, training is key – the more skilled your Customer Service (CS) agents are, the more productive they become. Do you wish to find out more? Then we invite you to read this article.
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6 Ways of Improving Your Customer Service Agent Productivity
Improving agent productivity in your call centres or physical branches is a multi-step process. One solution is often insufficient to see a remarkable change in efficiency, but a combination of a few innovations can significantly reshape your customer service teams and drive productivity, driving profit. After all, if your teams can deal with a higher number of queries at the same time, it translates to your organisation earning more while investing the same amount of money.
How to achieve these gains and improve agent productivity in your call centres, digital centres, and physical branches? Here are a few solutions.
1. Invest in AI and Automation
The best way to help your employees become more productive is to have some of their tasks done without taking up their time. This can be achieved with intelligent automation and AI.
You should start this by automating the responses to particular questions in your customer contact centres. A bot, AI-powered for better effectiveness, can respond to those customers who have simple queries, like for instance, checking their balance or checking the status of a particular application or a claim. But this is just the beginning
With the use of AI in banking and CS agents, you can create a mixed system. In such a case, the AI bot can handle simple queries and request approval from the customer service agent when a more complex one appears. This way, the agent will be provided with a ready answer, which, if incorrect, they can quickly modify and send to the customer. The result? A major improvement in the number of customers serviced by your agents per hour and a large rise in their productivity.
It is also possible to provide your agents with AI co-pilots or assistants. These are generative AI models that aid the agent by changing the tone of messages or providing answers with links to the sources within your bank’s regulations. In this case, each ticket goes through the agent, but it takes significantly less time to solve.
What AI-powered tools can help you with agent productivity? We recommend two solutions:
- Our AI chatbots – We can help you develop and implement Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots into your banking system that will take over some of the tasks from your customer service agents.
- Our customer engagement platform – We also offer you a ready solution for banks – our Livebank platform. It’s equipped with virtual assistants, eKYC solutions and many other features that will help you improve the productivity of your customer service agents.
- AI Document Processing – This solution can improve efficiency and productivity and enhance decision-making processes.
If you feel that you need a bespoke solution tailored specifically to the needs of your bank, or are interested in either of the above, just contact us – see what we can do for you.
2. Optimize Communication with Team Leaders
One of the main factors that hinder agent productivity in call centres is the lack of proper access to their team leaders – people who should serve as guides in more difficult cases. This might have two reasons:
- insufficient number of team leaders compared to the number of agents,
- lack of proper communication tools and methods between the agents and team leaders.
After all, if the agent has to wait for their team leader to be free to help them or cannot find them anywhere in the room, they spend more time on one call. Therefore, ensuring that the communication is smooth is a must.
How to do this? We recommend a few solutions:
- Provide your agents with easy-to-access knowledge sources – A database of all the information customer agents need is a must. After all, if they can find a piece of knowledge there, they won’t need to ask their team leader. Here, you should focus on seamless navigation through the resource library – include tags in it and make sure that the search engine is intuitive.
- Integrate team leader’s workflow into your systems – A team leader is helping a particular agent? Make it visible for other employees, so that they know that the leader is occupied and where to find them.
3. Enhance Task Management
Some agents might be better at answering questions via chat; others might handle phone calls faster. If you want to improve your customer service agent productivity, you need to learn who’s good at what and put this knowledge into practice.
How to do that? Again, we recommend artificial intelligence combined with machine learning. ML for finance is helpful (and you probably use it) for analysing your customers, but it can also be utilised to evaluate your agents. Then, you can use the data gathered and feed it to an AI-powered tool, which will distribute the tasks depending on what each agent is good at. The result? Every person is in the right place, letting you achieve maximum productivity from your resources.
4. Fund Proper Training
The more skilled your customer service agents are, the more productive they become. Therefore, one of the key efforts you should undertake when building higher efficiency in your financial institution is to invest in adequate, high-quality training. Here, you need to adopt a multi-layered approach and focus on:
- Procedural training – Involving all the regulations in your financial institution that the agents might need when talking with the client.
- General customer service training – Tackling aspects such as how to talk to a customer, handling angry clients, etc.
- Tool training – Focusing on using the tools that you implemented in the customer service team, such as the previously mentioned AI assistants.
Remember to keep your employees up to date with the innovations and changes in your organisation. Also, it’s good to provide them with revision training – after a year or two, they might not recall everything that they have learned, and such follow-ups might help them remember.
5. Embrace Self-Service
We have already mentioned automation but purely from the inside point of view. Now, we shall look from the outside – from your client’s perspective. Investing in self-service solutions is an excellent way to improve the productivity of your customer service agents mainly for two reasons:
- It takes some tasks off them – If, for example, the customer can go through an eKYC process on their own with the use of AI and biometrics, your agents do not have to spend time on manual authentication.
- It can be done asynchronously – Even if you cannot fully automate self-service, it can still improve your agent productivity. As long as it’s not conducted in real-time, your employees can do their tasks related to self-service processes when there are fewer tickets during a time they would typically spend idle, hence increasing their efficiency even further.
6. Automate Meeting Management
Automation does not end with self-service and bots – you can also implement it for meeting management. After all, it takes a lot of time for your agents to schedule their meetings with the clients every month, so providing them with an automated IT solution can release a lot of time – time they can use for more productive, value-bringing activities.
At Ailleron, we offer a solution that will help you achieve this: our Appointment Manager based on the TIMIFY® engine. Thanks to it, you can automate the whole process, both when online and offline meetings are concerned. What is important, it enables your customers to schedule meetings themselves, which is much more convenient – especially since 80% of banking customers do this after office hours and during the weekends.
To add to that, this solution can be easily integrated into other systems you use, such as CRM or ERP. Thanks to this, you can streamline the preparation process of your customer service agents, letting them save even more time and offer more personalised services.
The solution works with the most popular technologies, including Teams, Zoom, Google Meet and our platform LiveBank. It’ll prove use in any type of banking – we strongly recommend it.
Conclusions
There are many different ways how you can improve the productivity of your customer service agents in call centres, physical branches and digital contact centres. Many of them involve investing in IT tools; however, this initial spending will bring a steady return in a matter of months, as it can boost the efficiency of your employees significantly. Therefore, do not hesitate – follow the tips from our article and enhance your customer service teams.
You might also read: Hyper personalisation in banking and customer service in/from the future
