Adopting the Latest Technologies
BFSI companies have focused on adopting latest technologies in their contact centres to overcome the pandemic challenges:
The pandemic and the lockdowns announced by the central and state governments and restrictions like social distancing have created major challenges for organizations, especially for customer-centric functions that required employees and their managers to be in close proximity. Easwaran of India Post Payments Bank says: “For us, it was largely related to upskilling the workforce for the work-fromhome model as well as educating customers about accessing our self-service channel. The entire pandemic period till date has been a learning journey for our workforce as well as customers.”
To ensure that employees work in a secured environment without affecting their productivity levels, Aviva Life Insurance provided infrastructure support such as laptops and VPN connections. Kunal provides details of the new solutions introduced by the company: “We have enabled a slew of solutions such as cloud telephony for the entire team. For callers to be able to operate on their mobile phones, admin activates all callers at the beginning of a shift, post which the calls start getting diverted to the caller’s number registered on the application.”
Dheeraj says: “WFH required VPN connectivity, desktops to be changed to laptops, stronger Wi-Fi connections for homes and moving some of our call center solutions on personal phones. Being a
bank, all solutions needed to get clearance from info-security given that the team has access to customer data. Recently, we have invested in solutions that improve supervisor control, audit and intervention to ensure that we deliver the same standards of service during these difficult times.”.
KV Dipu adds: “Firstly, the desktops were delivered to our employees at their home, VPN access was extended along with dongles for internet facility to work efficiently from outside the office environment. These steps ensured seamless work experience for our employees.”
SECURITY MEASURES
Even before the onset of the pandemic, Kotak Mahindra Bank already had a business continuity plan in place. Its contact centers easily transitioned into a workfrom-home mode without compromising on the security of the customers’ data and accessibility of services. The bank achieved a seamless extension of ‘on-premises contact center officers into ‘home agents’ using new surveillance software.
Puneet shares details: “The single sign-on facility over VPN or desktop v i r t uali z at i on e nsures s e c uri ty and compliance, in which our ‘home agents’ have full access to the existing contact center technology and business processes. In addition to this, we have upgraded our call recording systems to ensure good quality of audio recordings.”
Apart from a VPN connection to access the bank’s software, Equitas Small Finance Bank had strengthened the remote surveillance of its technology assets. Says Eswaran: “Our WFH operations model was based on utilization of the office IT infrastructure (included the movement of systems) and henceforth had all the security controls enabled in office IT infrastructure.”
Kunal belie ves in safeguarding information as an important aspect for insurance organizations to deal with customer data. He says: “Keeping that in mind, we have implemented multiple measures for contact center staff as they are working from home, including VPN, multi-factor authentication and a compliance manager to keep a check on the security posture of contact center team’s hardened devices.”
DEPLOYMENT OF CHATBOTS
Chatbots are mainly deployed for making outgoing calls to intimate customers on their upcoming dues, pre-approved offers, and for taking in confirmation of various facilities that the bank offers. Dheeraj says: “We are currently testing chatbots to handle incoming calls and for providing an FAQ on digitally sourced accounts that required conversion to a full KYC account. We are aiming to have bots in 7 languages as the bank has a significant presence in non-metro locations and economically weaker sections.”
Aviva Life Insurance uses a mix of technology solutions for faster and effective resolution of customer engagement. For example, chatbots replicate the behaviour of a human representative, while ensuring the accuracy and efficiency of an advanced machine system. Kunal adds: “Our stateof-the-art CRM system is fully integrated with a customer portal, mobile application and website, IVR and cloud telephony. This helps us get a unified view of the customer’s journey with us.”
Aviva Life Insurance chatbot, ALISHA (an acronym for Aviva Life Insurance Self Help Assistant) is amongst India’s first few NLP (Natural Language Processor) powered conversational computing solutions. It allows existing and prospective customers of the company to have easy access to information about various insurance policies and 24x7 and round the clock instant response to their queries. It also promotes financial literacy across all ages and geographies, with Insurance Made Simple, a skill taught to Alexa’s voice bot. With Alexa, Aviva is de-jargonizing complex insurance terms through the latest digital innovation.
“In a day inbound handles 350-400 cases and outbound around 100-125 cases. We are catering to Hindi and English at a
call center and for the regional language, we route the customers to the branches. For outbound regional calling, we connect with the branch resource and take customers on the conference”, says Kunal.
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance has a multilingual chatbot ‘BOING’ which is currently available in 3 languages - English, Hindi, and Marathi. It offers 24x7 customer assistance and instantly responds to customer queries. BOING is capable of handling major queries and requests related to policy servicing, claim assistance, policy renewal and new policy purchase. BOING is also integrated with WhatsApp to be available at every touchpoint and address customer queries instantly.
OVERCOMIJNG CHALLENGES
Equitas Small Finance Bank’s video banking services were launched to provide customers with in-person, personalized remote servicing of requests. Dheeraj explains: “Through video banking, we eliminated the need to visit the branches to submit proofs for making account level changes. The service has gained significant traction during the lockdown as it was easy to use and was provided for all customer segments.”
He adds: “We intend to scale up video banking capabilities to cut across all requests that are traditionally managed by the branch. This will help us to standardize our ser vice levels and make it ver y convenient for customers.”
India Post Payments Bank revamped its training content for recruits along with a feedback mechanism.
In 2020 post lockdown, Aviva Life Insurance placed one SPOC number on its website to handle escalated calls since WFH was not immediately up. Few callers were diverted to live chat volume handling and email desk as customers were using these two mediums to connect with the bank. Additionally, a hybrid model of managing relaxation and grace period from home as well as office was also implemented to ensure 100% availability to customers to provide a seamless experience.
Puneet says: “Over 40% of calls received at the contact center were complemented by WhatsApp communications, due to which the Net Promoter Score, a common b a r o meter f o r g a ugi ng c us t o mers’ satisfaction, rose by 9-11 points. Customers can also make loan-related inquiries via Keya voice bot.”
FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES
Dheeraj predicts that AI-based technologies will be in use to improve call center supervision like real-time custom sentiment analysis, omnichannel chatbots to ensure the customer can start a conversation in a social media handle and complete the transaction or service chat on messenger.
Easwaran reveals details about the importance of the role of AI: “As part of our overall digital transformation journey, the focus is on utilizing the technologies to strengthen our self-service channels. Additionally, the role of AI is not ruled out in optimizing the utilization of contact centers as a channel.”
Kunal believes the future of customer service will be with video bots. According to him, while text and audio services have brought about awesome changes in the industry, the new wave is set to come through video solutions and video collaboration tools. “Since the chatbot and audio bot got picked up in the times of lockdown, it gives me higher hopes for video bots,” he says.