– By Vikas Garg
Contact centre agents are recognised as the frontline champions, especially in the BFSI sector. Characterized by complex financial products and urgency of complaints,the sector is flooded with customer queries, seeking instant and accurate resolutions. Given the scenario, the sector is facing unprecedented challenges in its contact centre operations as a majority of them are poised towards addressing compliance needs and high call volumes.
Key challenges in BFSI Contact Centers
Contact centres in the BFSI sector handle a vast range of inquiries, from basic policy details to complex claims and financial disputes. The need to handle regulatory compliance, legal formalities, and financial transactions increases the pressure on agents which often leads to longer wait times and a suboptimal customer experience. In tandem, non-adherence of strict legal guidelines can lead to severe financial and legal consequences.
Repetitive tasks like answering FAQs (e.g., claim status, policy coverage, premium payments) take up a significant portion of an agent’s time. This limits the ability of agents to focus on more complex and high-value interactions.
Apart from this, BFSI companies operate in regions with multiple languages and need to serve customers across various platforms, including phone, chat, social media, and email. Hence, ensuring a seamless and unified customer experience across all channels remains a challenge for contact centre agents.
In an era where 90% of customers expect near-instantaneous responses to their financial inquiries, voice bots have emerged as a game-changer. It has emerged as a revolutionary tool in helping BFSI firms enhance their operational efficiencies and improve customer satisfaction to stay ahead in the market.
Know where Voice Bots can help your customers & agents:
1. Fraud Detection and Prevention
Detecting fraud in a BFSI company can be a complex process, particularly claims, considering manual processes are slow and prone to oversight. Voice bots can automate initial fraud detection by asking validation questions, cross-referencing customer data, and flagging suspicious claims for further investigation. This enables faster detection and reduces the risk of fraudulent activities.
2. Automating Claims Management
In the traditional insurance industry, claims management is a time-consuming, detail-oriented process. Customers often need to provide documents, policy details, and accident information which leads to high call volumes, long wait times, and frustrated customers. With the integration of voice bots, they can automate the initial stages of claims processing like collecting essential information (e.g., policy number, accident details), verifying eligibility, and providing real-time claim status updates.
Ultimately, this can result in faster initiation of claims, reduced wait times, and fewer calls directed to human agents, leading to improved customer satisfaction.
3. Proactive Premium Reminders and Renewals
One of the biggest concerns for insurance companies is premium/payment defaults due to missed renewals. Customers often forget to renew their policies, resulting in coverage lapses, which impact customer retention and revenue. To address this concern, voice bots can be programmed to proactively remind customers when their policy is nearing expiry. They can also assist in completing the renewal process over the phone or suggest policy upgrades based on customer history.
This results in improved retention rates, fewer policy lapses, and increased upsell opportunities during renewal conversations.
4. Multilingual Support
A majority of BFSI institutions operate across multiple regions, often dealing with customers who prefer interacting in regional languages. This puts extensive strain on customer support teams, as finding enough multilingual agents can be challenging.
BFSI institutions are always on a constant hunt for solutions that can help them bring customer centricity and hyper-personalisation. Voice bots can significantly reduce the painstaking task of customer support teams in finding multiple multilingual agents as they can intelligently converse with customers in their preferred language, ensuring accessibility and faster resolution times, especially in rural or regional areas.
5. Complaint Management and Grievance Resolution
Customers can often become frustrated waiting for their issues to be resolved, mostly due to IVR queues, leading to escalations.voice bots can handle the initial intake of complaints, gather necessary information, and provide an estimated resolution time. Additionally, bots can track the status of the complaint and update the customer in real-time, ensuring transparency throughout the process.
Voice Bot integration in handling the task results in faster resolution, reduced need for follow-up calls, and an improved customer experience, leading to higher satisfaction rates.
6. Resolving Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
BFSI contact centre agents remain overburdened with customer queries and repetitive FAQs—such as policy renewals, claim filing procedures, and document requirements consume a majority of their time, resulting in increased operational costs and delays in response. Embedding an integrated voice bot can handle such routine inquiries efficiently, providing instant, accurate answers without agent involvement.
Customers asking about claim statuses, policy details, or coverage inquiries receive real-time responses. Voice botscan deflect up to 60% of such inquiries, allowing agents to focus on more complex issues while reducing response times and operational strain.
Conclusion:
With a host of benefits, voice bots have become a significant game-changer in optimising operational costs and improving customer experience. By automating up to 80% of routine inquiries, new-age voice bots can free up agents to focus on high-value interactions, such as customer relationship management, complex queries, and regulatory compliance.
In a short span, voice bots are becoming an industry standard, offering additional advantages – handling complex inquiries across multiple channels, and integrating with backend systems to offer real-time solutions to create a highly engaging ecosystem, with improved bottom lines.
(Vikas Garg is the Co-founder & CPO of Kapture CX.)
(Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of Financial Express Online. Reproducing this content without permission is prohibited.)