Transforming the Banking Customer and Employee Experiences with Mitel

Agile, innovative financial technology companies, or fintechs, are disrupting the competitive landscape for banks and credit unions by offering new digital gateways to banking, payments, credit, and investing services. Because they were ‘born digital,’ fintechs are data–driven and excel in delivering convenient, easy–to–use services. They exploit technology to their advantage, offering 24/7 availability, instant video meetings, and informed responses to recent customer behavior. And because fintechs don’t need branch networks to sell and distribute their services, they can offer aggressive rates and low prices while retaining good margins.

The fintech model is gaining acceptance with digitally savvy customers who value fast service, anytime/ anywhere accessibility, and lower costs. A Harris Poll survey found that eight in 10 American consumers used a fintech app to manage their money in 2022. Nine in 10 consumers said they benefit from digital tools. A Plaid survey revealed that customers are choosing this technology because it saves time (93%) and money (78%), helps them make better financial decisions (73%) and reduces financial stress (71%).

But banks and credit unions also have advantages. They are local, trusted, and have an extensive customer base. They’re also highly motivated to fight back against fintechs — implementing digital workflows to deliver enhanced customer experiences, lower costs, and automated processes that are secure and compliant by design.

The two digital transformation opportunities that promise the most significant impact for banks and credit unions are reinventing their contact centers and branch and office operations. We’ll focus on how they can capitalize on each opportunity by using Mitel Financial Services Solutions to accentuate their strengths and digitize their weaknesses.

Creating the Customer Experience of the Future

The role of a bank’s contact center is evolving from focusing on customer problem resolution to becoming a hub for comprehensive customer relationship management. For contact center managers, this is a tremendous transition that requires that they meet new customer, management, and employee expectations.

Customers

Customers expect various services to be provided by knowledgeable agents who have the skills, product knowledge, and resources to identify the right solution for them and implement it efficiently.

Bank Management

Management wants their contact center to improve customer satisfaction by delivering efficient, personalized service across various banking offers. They also need agents to possess product knowledge and telesales expertise to meet sales objectives. And they expect agents to accomplish both goals while ensuring every transaction mitigates potential fraud and meets security and compliance regulations.

Employees

Employees desire their contact center managers to empower them to successfully achieve these goals while providing them the flexibility to maintain a work/life balance. Like many businesses today, banks struggle with employee retention, putting two fundamental goals — customer service and compliance — at risk.

Call centers must rise to these new expectations quickly without increasing staff. Call center managers are under pressure to help agents work more productively, acquire new skill sets, and spend time with the customers who need them most.

Thankfully, they can count on Mitel to help meet everyone’s expectations.

Providing Personalized Service via Self–serve Channels

Only some customers need the help of a contact center agent. Some are happy to use other channels if they can obtain efficient customer service. Mitel's MiContact Center Business is an omnichannel customer experience management platform that gives financial institutions the tools to deliver personalized service on a customer’s preferred channel, be it phone, email, SMS, Web chat, chat/voice bot, social media, etc.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing today’s customer experience landscape and several end–to–end contact center solutions that let Financial Services Institutions (FSIs) incorporate AI into core customer engagement processes. For instance, Mitel Virtual Agent — a Google Cloud Contact Center AI–powered tool that works with MiContact Center Business — provides an informal chat or voice bot to act as a virtual agent, delivering services, promoting new products, and providing personalized customer experiences — all without human intervention.

Mitel Virtual Agent can monitor and analyze a customer's and virtual agents' conversations. When the virtual agent can’t respond to a particular question, the AI is smart enough to bring a live agent to the discussion and provide the agent with the conversation history. Mitel Agent Assist then continues to monitor the conversation and delivers real–time suggested responses to the agent so they don’t have to search for answers themselves.

FSIs can also leverage Mitel’s self–service Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system with their contact center with optional speech recognition that helps identify the customer’s intent, segment, authenticate, and route customers to the best agents to handle the request. Customers searching for simple information can find it by chatting with the virtual agent without speaking to live agents.

Integrating virtual assistants like PolyAI with Mitel’s MiContact Center Business personalizes the service, reduces call volumes, lowers call abandonment rates, and allows agents to dedicate their time to helping customers with more complex requests.

Empowering Call Center Agents with Up–to–Date Customer Intelligence

When you’re accountable for customer relationship management, context is everything. The better you understand a customer, the better you can meet their needs. That’s why Mitel Contact Center and unified communications solutions integrate seamlessly with CRM solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Freshdesk, Oracle, and SAP. While speaking to customers, agents can access CRM intelligence to understand their history, preferences, and buying behaviors. In addition, Mitel integrations with solutions like Jack Henry and Fiserv provide agents with CRM intelligence via screen pops that include member details, contact history, and recommended responses.

These CRM and digital banking integrations drive improvements in agent productivity and contact center metrics in two ways:

• Agents can resolve customer issues faster, improving service quality and metrics like first–contact resolution, call transfer rates, and net promoter scores.
• Agents can upsell and cross–sell products more effectively, improving sales per hour and net sales metrics.

Mitel’s MiContact Center Business supports customer–based routing to empower agent success further. If specific agents are better suited to handling certain customers and issues, customer–based routing automatically routes a caller to the agent best equipped to serve them.

And by providing every agent with Mitel’s MiVoice Business and collaboration tools, they can efficiently bring additional expertise to resolve complex issues. Agents can quickly search for available experts and collaborate with them in real time via phone, messaging, or video. And if they need to transfer the customer to that expert, they can do so with the click of a button.

Minimizing Fraud and Meeting Compliance Requirements with Automated Workflows

Contact center managers can’t sacrifice security and regulatory requirements despite the pressure to achieve challenging metrics. Mitel can help make those processes transparent to the customer with automated workflows designed to comply with regulatory requirements.

LumenVox Integration with Mitel’s MiContact Center Business

The LumenVox integration creates an ID verification and validation solution that applies voice biometrics to assess callers who come into a call center before they ever speak to an agent. By confirming that callers are who they say they are via their voiceprint, FSIs can reduce the risk of fraud. Other fraud mitigation solutions provided by Mitel Financial Services Solutions include automated fraud alerts and multi–factor authentication.

Mitel Partnerships with Data Protection Software Companies

Call centers need to comply with specific regulations. For instance, our integration with Sycurio allows agents to mask client credit card numbers and personally identifiable information (PII) from live conversations and call recordings, which helps financial institutions adhere to regulatory requirements such as MiFID II, Dodd–Frank Act, and PCI DSS. For additional support with PCI DSS compliance and secure data connections, Mitel also integrates with SecureCo, Eckoh, and PCIpal.

Optimizing Call Center Performance and Employee Flexibility

Contact center managers and agents are measured against increasing metrics that measure agent efficiency/effectiveness and customer satisfaction. Mitel Workforce Optimization allows financial institutions to monitor and tune operations to keep everyone satisfied continuously. For instance, managers can:

• Match staffing to customer demand, ensuring they have the correct number of agents with the right skills, place, and time.
• Monitor service quality levels across channels, score agents, and identify areas of improvement by recording all member interactions and using quality management and speech/desktop analytics solutions.
• Empower employees with tools to manage their careers, like the Mitel WFM mobile app to check their work schedules, view messages, trade shifts, request vacation, state preferences, and add overtime availability.

Meeting Everyone’s Expectations with Mitel Financial Service Solutions

Banks and credit unions may not have been ‘born digital.’ Still, they’re rapidly applying digital technologies to reduce customer churn, elevate customer and employee satisfaction, and improve net promoter scores by equipping every agent (virtual and live) with the tools to deliver high–quality, efficient, and personalized service.

Contact us to learn how Mitel Financial Services Solutions can help your contact center thrive in the digital age, improve your bottom line, and adhere to security, compliance, and fraud mitigation requirements.