Flip the script: Put agent experience first (not members)

Improving customer experience starts with improving employee experience. Explore the link between agent satisfaction and AI powered knowledge assist solutions.

As leaders, you are under constant pressure to prioritize customer experience, growth, and profitability.  You have a hundred things to do where most of them take priority over driving culture changes such as better employee experience. However, in the words of great management guru Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – your organizational success hinges on its people more than anything else. 

We recently hosted a webinar featuring Brad Shafton, SVP of IT & Digital at Magnifi Financial (watch the recording here). Brad offered a powerful insight:

The employee experience is what creates the member experience.

The better experience the employees have – the more information they have at their fingertips or the more they are able to get involved in conversations – their satisfaction increases which then allows them to give better experience to our members, that’s where it starts.

Brad Shafton, Magnifi

Yet, your team is experiencing high attrition, poor morale, and overall very poor experience. Something is definitely amiss. In conversations with over 1,000 community financial institutions at industry events and conferences, a recurring theme emerged: agents struggle with an inefficient system for accessing information. This includes policies, procedures, and past customer interactions that hinders their ability to serve members effectively.

Information Silo Struggle

As you grew and your members/ customers evolved – you added more products, more services, more channels – which led to the creation of tons of information on your end. This information is needed by your team to complete their day to day tasks, which is trapped in individual brains (knowledge silos), lost in email chains, or scattered across different software programs such as webpages, PDFs, CSVs, and more. 

It’s easy to shrug this off as “how we work now,” but the cost of working with these siloed and fragmented knowledge base systems is higher than you estimate. 

Your agents are expected to deliver like a ‘Big Bank’ 

Big banks & Fintech companies are extracting insights from live customer interactions, their historical data, expert knowledge, seasonality-based trends, and other relevant data sets to continuously adjust their customer engagement & assistance strategies in real-time to lure more your customers. 

However, teams at community banks and credit unions have both financial and human resource concerns that don’t make the above sustainable. This results in your employees often finding themselves lacking the knowledge, insights, and data which they need to access to provide the best possible service to their customers – leading to poor employee experience (hits morale and leads to job dissatisfaction) and customer engagement. 

Your agents pay a heavy ‘Toggle Tax’

Let’s ignore complex customer insights or historical context for a moment. Your agents don’t even have ready access to simple information most times, they have to go through multiple resources to find the correct information. 

Say for example, How many times do you think you toggle between applications over the course of your day to complete your task?

100? 500? 1000?…

In an Harvard Business Review it was revealed that over the course of an average day, a single employee would toggle between apps and windows more than 3,600 times. The data is in context to a Fortune 500 company, but I am sure you get the picture – it’s a lot! – and a waste of time, effort, and focus.

Toggle tax does get reduced with time and training, but it requires considerable time and effort spent in training and mentoring – while the customer has no time for being a guinea pig for your trainees, they will demand and expect your best all the time. 

Multiple problems, One solution – AI powered knowledge assistants

Procedures, processes, and systems change with little to no warning in the banking industry. Mining and stitching this information spread across various formats and sources – basics, compliance & regulations, data security, customer interaction history, and more – can feel impossible, especially in real-time. Fragmented systems also limit collaboration, impeding sharing of ideas and innovations.

Throwing more people at this is not an answer. Finding, training, and monitoring the right people is even tougher. Often you end up relying on only a handful of experts to deliver the best – overwhelming them and creating dissatisfaction / inefficiency for others. The departure of these experts also creates critical knowledge gaps.

Throwing more personnel or systems at these problems will be akin to sticking a band-aid on a gaping wound. We, as tech enthusiasts, believe in tackling challenges with innovative solutions that don’t strain your resources. But before we do that, let’s look at the existing setup.

Improving agent experience and performance at your credit union or community bank can start with implementation of the right technology and frameworks for effective knowledge dissemination. Since, if you look at this – your agents don’t need to know everything all the time to deliver great service. They just need to be able to access ‘everything’ in time and with ease. 

A GenAI based employee assistant can sync and access all your knowledge bases (automatically) and enable your employees to deliver quick and accurate responses to your customers, eliminating the need to search through multiple sources of information. The graph here depicts how powerful AI advances can prove to be in creating multiple experts all at once. 

Democratize access to insights for all your agents using Eltropy 

Eltropy’s GenAI Knowledge Assistant empowers you to rethink the way your team transfers knowledge to each other and your customers.  Let’s start with simplifying their daily tasks. Imagine your team confidently resolving any member/customer issue, independently and accurately. This empowers them and elevates the overall experience. 

  • Consolidate knowledge: Unify information from various sources into a single, searchable platform.
  • Deliver instant answers: Empower agents to answer member questions quickly and accurately.
  • Seamless integration: Work within existing workflows for minimal disruption.
Centralizes all knowledge across systems into one place without any manual work, securely.  Delivers instant responses to your agent questions from all structured and unstructured sources. Integrates into your existing workflows and communication channels (no need to switch).
Accurately identifies intent, entities, and sentiment in real-time conversations using CFI-specific natural language understanding (NLU) and processing (NLP). Delivers proactive suggestions in addition to contextual and relevant information.

Happy Employees Make Happy Members

Eltropy’s GenAI Knowledge Assistant ROI

  • Faster resolutions: Reduced information search times lead to quicker issue resolution.
  • Consistent service: All agents have access to the same comprehensive knowledge base, ensuring consistent high-quality service.

How can this setup work for your specific needs? Speak to our experts, use this link

Eltropy also enables you to create specialized bots for different departmental needs and customize its capabilities as per knowledge, behavior, and past interactions. There is also a goldmine of intelligence in your member and customer interactions which can lead you to discover service improvement opportunities, compliance risk & performance improvements, and sales opportunities, but more on this later. 

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