How Microsoft and generative AI are transforming financial service contact centers

Matt didn’t see the dog until the last second. Swerving suddenly, he missed the dog—then hit a parked car. Rattled but unhurt, he called his insurance company.

The contact center agent who answered Matt’s call immediately authenticated him with voice biometrics, removing potential friction from this highly charged moment. Guided by AI-powered insights and suggestions, the agent then walked Matt through a quick yet complete intake process. Automatically, the contact center platform sent Matt an SMS link to upload photos of the damage, as well as follow-up communications with details of his claim. Afterwards, the platform generated a call summary, and extracted details and insights for future calls. And Matt, despite the fender bender, felt better about his insurer for making the process so easy.

This scenario, which until very recently would have seemed futuristic, is just one of many examples of how generative AI is redefining the very notion of a contact center for insurance companies, banks, and other capital markets firms. It is only one example of the kind of transformation we at Microsoft together with our global partners are helping customers realize with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.

The contact center cost conundrum

COVID-19 highlighted the critical importance of contact centers to financial services businesses, as housebound customers had only phone calls, emails, and digital access to connect with their financial service providers. It was suddenly left to contact center agents and customer-facing digital tools to handle the lion’s share of many key functions, such as responding to customer problems, providing important information, and assisting with transactions and account issues.

As COVID-19 pressures ease and new business requirements emerge, companies now face new challenges to keep their contact centers vital and efficient. Among them:

• Modern customers expect personalized experiences, and they get frustrated by disconnected interactions and incomplete information that can result from siloed systems and data.
• Customers demand simple and effective self-service experiences and are turned off by limited solutions.
• Contact center agents want to focus on solving problems for customers, but struggle to use cumbersome tools and difficult training requirements, which can result in high rates of attrition.

The leaders we’ve talked to in financial services firms recognize that contact centers represent a major opportunity to enhance the bottom line and drive new revenue. But contact centers have traditionally been cost centers. Now with generative AI, companies have quickly recognized that the new capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and data analytics can further unlock business value.

The generative AI contact center

Generative AI is transforming contact centers with a set of powerful new capabilities such as:

• Content creation: authoring content that is similar in style and tone to what people are used to.
• Summarization: writing summaries from large volumes of data.
• Semantic search: using natural language to understand the intent behind queries.

These provide the basis of innovations such as intelligent chatbots, virtual assistants, and customized solutions that use natural language processing, interactive voice response (IVR), trend and sentiment analysis, and much more.

In practical terms, generative AI transforms the contact center into a highly efficient asset that understands abstract context, provides engagement at a near-human level, and empowers agents and employees to deliver service faster and more effectively.

The potential impacts of generative AI innovations are huge. Personalized interactions can dramatically boost service-to-sales conversions. Perceptive self-service tools can spike customer satisfaction through instant gratification. And tools that reduce data entry can improve agent productivity. On the expense side, AI can reduce labor costs by reducing training requirements for agents who, in turn, can deliver better customer experiences that increase customer loyalty.

We see generative AI providing near-term benefits for financial services firms in the following broad categories of use cases:

• Agent assistance: Empowering customer service and helpdesk agents with bots to provide insights and next-best-action guidance derived from disparate knowledge sources across the organization. Assistance can also incorporate multi-language transcription, management bots for forecasting simulations, and automated call scoring.
• Fraud detection: Continuously monitoring and analyzing incoming data streams for potential fraud. For example, advanced biometric detection not only enables immediate authentication based on a customer’s unique voiceprint, but it also recognizes an attempt to impersonate the customer.
• Interaction analytics: Identifying patterns in customer behavior to deliver increasingly personalized responses. Generative AI can look across every conversation (voice, text, email, and so on) to identify trends, inform product improvements, enhance agent coaching, and ensure compliance.
• Self-service: Automating routine tasks and repetitive queries with conversational chatbots and IVR capabilities that enable computers to have conversations with customers. Over time, generative AI can also create personalized responses in customer engagements based on experience and learning from across the organization.

Put generative AI to work in your contact center

Microsoft offers a broad suite of solutions and capabilities that addresses the contact center needs of financial services organizations. The generative AI use cases listed above, enabled by Microsoft technology, can be provided on any contact center platform including those from NICE CXone and Solgari, which run on Microsoft Azure. In addition, they can be provided through solutions in Azure from partners such as Verint and Callminer. Microsoft Azure data and AI services application programming interfaces (APIs) integrate easily with call center platforms to enable new use cases, which are enhanced greatly through the solutions and contributions of our global partner ecosystem and can be integrated into Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365.

Contact center transformation at Money20/20 USA

We were excited to showcase Microsoft’s remarkable innovations in contact center transformation at the Money20/20 USA conference in Las Vegas, Nevada from October 22 to 25, 2023. We demonstrated innovative solutions and highlighted the progress our customers and partners are making with solutions built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and the Microsoft Cloud. Among the highlights:

• At the Microsoft AI Lounge Powered by Nvidia, we hosted 30 presentations from more than 20 partners across a broad range of demos, case studies, and thought leadership topics. We were delighted to showcase how Microsoft is using generative AI in our own contact centers (with all 55,000 of our agents), which is delivering remarkable benefits.
• Microsoft partners presented an innovative set of solutions featuring generative AI scenarios in our lounge and in the Money 20/20 pavilion.
• Microsoft’s Daragh Morrissey, Director, Worldwide Financial Services, discussed Microsoft’s broader generative AI approach in a panel discussion on “AI, Quantum, and Crypto: Get Ready for the Impact on Payments.”

Get started on your journey today

Using generative AI to reinvent the contact center is an unparalleled opportunity not just to deepen customer relationships but to unlock new business value. With generative AI and the Microsoft Cloud, financial services businesses can optimize costs, reduce time to value, enhance collaboration, and use data to deliver more impactful business outcomes.

Learn more by visiting our website where you can discover how Microsoft and our partners are working together to help our customers transform financial services. If you want to accelerate your transformation journey, feel free to reach out to us or contact your Microsoft representative or technology partner.