How AI-powered customer experience enables banks to deliver real value for customers
Economic uncertainty caused consumer confidence to plunge in February 2025, marking the biggest monthly decline in more than three years. American consumers expressed deep concerns about future income, a weak job market, and a possible recession.
Fear about their economic future invariably motivates consumers to increase their focus on their personal financial well-being. Everyone wants to be prepared to maintain a life of dignity and satisfaction for themselves and their loved ones, in both good and bad times. Add in concerns about rising inflation rates, a volatile stock market and high interest rates, as well as the economic impact of current global events, and it’s easy to see why consumer confidence is severely rattled.
At a time when practically everyone is open to financial guidance relevant to them, banks have an opportunity to step in. They can truly take this opportunity to delight their customers by helping them prioritize how to maintain financial stability today. They can add value to their customers’ lives by helping them understand:
● How money works
● Various savings, loan, planning, and investing tools available for them to use
● Products that make sense for their current financial situations
● How to create a budget
● How to use a budget
● Where to find reliable financial education
Banks that proactively and consistently make themselves useful in their customers’ lives by successfully partnering with customers on their financial wellness journey will attract, retain, and grow long-term relationships.
However, to deliver a superior customer experience at scale, banks will have to make significant investments in technology and operational transformation while accelerating the practical application of new and untested technologies like AI. To many banks, these present formidable challenges. For starters, banks traditionally have been thoughtful and deliberate about technology implementations. Second, banks need to make this shift at a time when markets are more volatile and operating budgets are tighter.
While banks understand this and a few have experimented with mixed results, contact center as a channel presents a new opportunity for them to explore. A comprehensive AI-powered customer experience (CX) platform that does most of the digital transformation work in the contact center enables banks to deliver more value to customers at lower risk.
Contact centers are a critical customer engagement touchpoint for banks, enabling them to answer questions, resolve issues, and direct customers to the right resources. Unfortunately, traditional contact centers often struggle with efficiency. Understaffing and outdated technologies can lead to bottlenecks in service that diminish the customer experience.
AI and automation not only can improve the customer experience, but they also free up bank and credit union employees to focus on higher-value activities – such as working with customers and members on financial wellness.
Smarter client engagement
Banks that maximize AI adoption will be able to provide a personalized, frictionless experience for customers. Cloud-based, AI-powered contact centers can help financial institutions transform the customer experience by providing avenues for smarter client engagement. Specifically, this means:
● Conversational, contextual self-service. This will delight customers that prefer self-service and create capacity for higher-value customer engagement
● Automate routine call-related tasks for employees. By reducing the number of tasks call center agents must perform before, during, and after calls, banks free up more time for bank employees to have meaningful conversations with customers. Those conversations may start with better education and predictive upselling and cross-selling of existing products. They then can evolve to address the customer’s budgeting, financial planning, investing, and other significant longer-term decisions and options
AI-powered automation excels at enabling bank customers to help themselves quickly and efficiently. Automation makes it easy for financial services customers to check account balances, confirm interest rates on car loans, or transfer money from a savings account to a college fund. These are all activities that in the past may have required human interaction between agents and bank customers.
Further, financial services customers can enjoy the convenience of using AI and automation across multiple channels. An interaction initiated by a bank customer on one channel, such as email, can resume later with a human agent or a chat bot, without a loss of information.
Bank customers don’t want to wait on the phone while a support agent searches for information relevant to their conversations. And if the agent appears confused, unsure, or unknowledgeable, a customer might think, “They don’t even know me; how can I trust them with my finances?” AI ensures call center agents have the right customer information at the right time, while generative AI and sentiment analysis capabilities help agents navigate challenging customer conversations and situations with real-time suggestions.
Using insights to iterate
Banks can use predictive analytics to anticipate the needs of their customers. Every interaction with bank customers gives these institutions valuable data that can be mined to create personalized products and services.
Predictive analytics and generative AI equip customer service agents with ideal next-best actions that proactively add value to customer engagements more often and in richer ways. Conversational analytics equip agents to provide even better service during client interactions. Banks also can leverage sentiment analysis, mood insights and CX analytics to mine agent/customer conversations for insights to drive innovation.
Critically, using AI and analytics, banks can uncover opportunities to deploy automation and unlock greater capacity with the same resources. Predictive analytics can be used to boost revenue by identifying cross-selling and upselling opportunities. In addition, by analyzing customer data, banks can better assess risk, thus reducing the costs associated with fraud and delinquency.
Though it may seem counterintuitive, AI and automation empower banks to modernize through technology while also enhancing the personal touch. This gives customers confidence that their individual needs and goals are recognized and understood by a true financial partner.
Cost management benefits
Agentic AI capabilities of modern, cloud-based contact centers are transforming the customer experience for banks and their customers. AI and automation are enabling banks to personalize products and services for individual customers in ways that until now were unimaginable.
A comprehensive, integrated platform allows banks to accelerate and de-risk their AI CX modernization strategy. No longer do banks eager to modernize their CX platform have to face the prospect of making large capital investments to replace existing infrastructure. With AI-powered contact centers, banks can adopt new technologies without disrupting the customer journey.
Further, they can help banks avoid costs associated with chronic agent turnover, recruiting, and training. And by making their jobs less stressful and more rewarding, AI and automation alleviate agent burnout, reducing attrition and its associated costs.
Banks have long craved a seat at the family dinner table. This is the opportunity! Banks that provide their customers with proactive support in attaining their financial goals – whether through education about financial health, personalization of products and services, informed conversations with AI-assisted agents, and more – give themselves a significant competitive advantage. The new generation of cloud-based, AI-powered contact centers will redefine financial services through intelligent automation, GenAI, and predictive AI. These advanced support platforms can minimize the risk of new technologies disrupting the customer journey. By helping their customers make progress toward financial wellness, banks can drive long-term value for themselves in the form of strong brand loyalty and repeat business.
About Author:
Rahul Kumar is the vice president and general manager for financial services at Talkdesk.