3 Ways to Reduce Your Bank’s Call Center Costs (Without Sacrificing Quality)

As technology becomes an increasingly central part of our lives, consumer expectations for customer service are skyrocketing. Today’s consumers expect top-notch, personalized customer service, and they want it instantly through their preferred channel. For banks, providing this level of service can be expensive, especially when digital disruption is already cutting into profit margins.

So what can you do to reduce costs and still provide quality customer service?

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology such as conversational bots can be a cost-effective way to streamline and enhance call center operations. Here are three ways banks can use AI to reduce call center costs.

Conversational bots are a cost-effective way to streamline and enhance call center operations. Click To Tweet

1. Prevent unnecessary calls

Call centers are the most expensive form of customer service. The cost of maintaining a contact center, hiring a team of live agents, and operating phone lines is a huge drain on your bank’s resources. Just think: the average support center call costs $4.00. When your support center receives hundreds or thousands of calls per day, this adds up to an enormous expense.

Worst of all, most customers aren’t satisfied with their call center experiences. Customers are frequently transferred from agent to agent, increasing the length (and cost) of the call and leading to frustrated and dissatisfied customers.

The most obvious solution is to prevent these calls being made in the first place. Research shows that most customers prefer self-service to calling a live agent, so why not let them? Use an online knowledge base (FAQ) or AI-powered customer support bot to let customers help themselves and reduce customer care costs.

2. Automate simple customer support tasks

Sometimes customers can’t get the help they need through self-service, and they have to call the support center. But not all customer service inquiries are created equal. Simple inquiries don’t need a live agent to handle and can be shifted to automated channels.

An AI-powered customer support bot is a cost-effective way to handle routine customer support tasks. With a virtual agent, customers discuss their issue in plain English, and the bot can provide an intelligently generated response, freeing up human agents for more challenging support tasks. Sophisticated bots can even facilitate live agent handoff for the most complex inquiries. Best of all, the average cost of an online support request is just $0.10 to $0.15, or 96% cheaper than a call fielded by a live agent.

The average cost of an online support request is 96% cheaper than a call fielded by a live agent. Click To Tweet

Augmenting customer service with the assistance of AI can save your bank valuable time and resources.

3. Resolve each inquiry the first time

In some cases, customers really do need to speak with a live agent to solve their problem. In these cases, resolving the customer’s issue the first time can shorten average handling time and increase customer satisfaction.

To do this, give live agents all the information they need to quickly and accurately resolve customer inquiries. That means keeping track of each customer touch point in one place and making sure this information is easily accessible to any agent at any time.

An AI-powered customer support solution can aggregate customer histories from all support channels and provide this information to agents at the first point of contact. This integrated knowledge base can route agents to the ideal resolution faster and more accurately, reducing average call time and increasing customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Reducing call center costs while increasing customer satisfaction may seem impossible, but AI technology is making this goal a reality. With AI-powered customer support, you can provide superior service at a fraction of the cost.

3 Ways to Reduce Your Bank’s Call Center Costs (Without Sacrificing Quality). Click To Tweet