– By Vikas Garg

Contact center agents are recognized as the frontline champions, especially in the BFSI sector. The sector is characterized by complex financial products and urgent complaints and is flooded with customer queries seeking immediate and accurate solutions. Given the scenario, the sector is facing unprecedented challenges in its contact center operations as a majority of them are poised to meet compliance needs and high call volumes.

Key Challenges in BFSI Contact Centers

Contact Center i BFSI sector handling a wide range of enquiries, from basic policy details to complex claims and financial disputes. The need to manage regulatory compliance, legal formalities and financial transactions increases the pressure on agents, which often leads to longer waiting times and a suboptimal customer experience. At the same time, failure to comply with strict legal guidelines can lead to serious financial and legal consequences.

Repetitive tasks such as answering common questions (eg claim status, insurance coverage, premium payments) take up a significant amount of an agent’s time. This limits agents’ ability to focus on more complex and valuable interactions.

Apart from this, BFSI companies operate in multilingual regions and need to serve customers on various platforms including phone, chat, social media and email. Therefore, ensuring a seamless and unified customer experience across all channels remains a challenge for contact center agents.

At a time when 90% of customers expect almost immediate responses to their financial inquiries, voice bots has emerged as a game changer. It has emerged as a revolutionary tool to help BFSI companies improve their operational efficiency and improve customer satisfaction to be at the forefront of market.

Find out where Voice Bots can help your customers and agents:

1. Fraud Detection and Prevention

Detecting fraud in a BFSI company can be a complicated process, especially claims, given that manual processes are slow and subject to review. Voice bots can automate initial fraud detected by asking validation questions, cross-referencing customer data and flagging suspicious claims for further investigation. This enables faster detection and reduces the risk of fraudulent activities.

2. Automate claim management

In the traditional insurance industryclaims handling is a time-consuming, detail-oriented process. Customers often need to provide documents, policy details and accident information leading to high call volumes, long wait times and frustrated customers. With the integration of voice bots, they can automate the initial stages of claims handling, such as gathering important information (eg policy number, accident information), verifying eligibility and providing real-time status updates.

Ultimately, this can result in faster claims initiation, reduced wait times and fewer calls directed to human agents, leading to improved customer satisfaction.

3. Proactive premium reminders and renewals

One of the biggest problems for insurance companies is premium/payment notices due to missed renewals. Customers often forget to renew their policies, resulting in coverage lapses, affecting customer retention and revenue. To address this issue, voice bots can be programmed to proactively remind customers when their policy is nearing expiration. They can also help complete the renewal process over the phone or suggest policy upgrades based on customer history.

This results in improved retention rates, fewer policy lapses and increased upsell opportunities during renewal calls.

4. Multilingual support

A majority of BFSI institutions operate in multiple regions, often with clients who prefer to interact in regional languages. This puts a lot of strain on customer support teams, as finding enough multilingual agents can be a challenge.

BFSI institutions are always on the lookout for solutions that can help them create customer focus and hyper-personalization. Voice bots can significantly reduce the arduous task of customer support teams finding multiple multilingual agents as they can intelligently speak to customers in their preferred language, ensuring availability and faster resolution times, especially in rural or regional areas.

5. Complaint handling and complaint resolution

Customers can often become frustrated while waiting for their issues to be resolved, mostly due to IVR queues, leading to escalation. voice bots can handle the initial intake of complaints, gather the necessary information and provide an estimated resolution time. Additionally, bots can track the status of the complaint and update the customer in real time, ensuring transparency throughout the process.

Voice Bot integration in task management results in faster resolution, reduced need for follow-up calls and an improved customer experience, leading to higher satisfaction levels.

6. Resolution of frequently asked questions (FAQs)

BFSI contact center agents remain overburdened with customer queries and recurring FAQs – such as policy renewals, claims procedures and document requirements consume a majority of their time, resulting in increased operational costs and delays in response. Embedding an integrated voice bot can handle such routine requests efficiently and provide immediate, accurate responses without agent intervention.

Customers inquiring about claim status, policy details or coverage inquiries receive real-time responses. Voice bot scanning diverts up to 60% of such requests, allowing agents to focus on more complex questions while reducing response times and operational stress.

Conclusion:

With a host of benefits, voice bots have become a significant game changer in optimizing operating costs and improving customer experience. By automating up to 80% of routine inquiries, new voice bots can free up agents to focus on valuable interactions, such as customer relationship management, complex issues and regulatory compliance.

In a short time, voice bots are becoming an industry standard and offer additional benefits – handling complex requests across multiple channels and integrating with backend systems to offer real-time solutions to create a highly engaging ecosystem, with improved results.

(Vikas Garg is co-founder and CPO of Kapture CX.)

(Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of Financial Express Online. Reproduction of this content without permission is prohibited.)