Evolving the banking contact center with AI-enabled customer support

Sang Kim is the head of U.S. Virtual Connect and Customer Advocacy at BMO. He has led retail and business banking for several financial institutions across a more than 25-year career. Throughout his career, he’s demonstrated a deep commitment to enhancing the customer experience, and as head of BMO’s customer contact teams, he is focused on realizing the potential of AI to evolve the customer experience.  

“AI is already playing a tremendous role in enhancing the customer experience and improving relationships with customers, all of which is key to maintaining customer loyalty,” he says. 

How can financial institutions determine which of the numerous AI technologies out there are right for their business?  

We’re all aware of the potential of AI to transform numerous aspects of everyday life. In banking, decisions about how and where to use AI should always be centered on customer needs and whether the technology supports those needs. You should always ask: what is this solving for? Many of the implementations and enhancements of AI being used today support greater convenience for customers and employees and improved operational efficiencies for the business. But as AI advances further, I believe there will be a shift toward deepening relationships with customers, creating customer loyalty and driving revenue opportunities. In my work leading BMO’s contact center, our team is always looking for ways to AI-enable our customer support and meet our customers’ evolving needs. 

How can AI be applied in a contact center context? 

AI-enabled customer care is already helping to improve both the customer experience and agent productivity. For example, using AI, we’re able to ensure that we’re capturing the right information from customer interactions and that speech analytics are getting valuable insights and information from those interactions. Sentiment analysis and natural language processing play important roles in helping agents empathize with customers, guiding them through sometimes challenging conversations, while data insights from customer calls also provide key inputs into personalizing product recommendations and the overall customer experience. Another key role AI can play in contact centers is in guiding frontline agents through customer interactions in real time. By providing in-the-moment hints drawn from our documentation, AI can help agents find the best responses to customer issues and questions. It’s also instrumental in helping us manage our after-call work—the note-taking and information parsing from a customer call. The ability of the technology to do this work in real time helps our agents prepare call summaries and extract information that then flows into our CRM platform. All of this enables agents to focus on the customer, providing opportunities to grow loyalty and drive increased revenue. 

How are contact center agents working with chatbots and other AI-based technology?  

We’ve recently changed our name to Virtual Connect because we’re aiming to provide an experience that’s no different from visiting a relationship manager in a branch. We view ourselves as virtual bankers who can connect customers to all the subject matter experts within the bank based on their questions and the services they’re seeking. So, we’re taking a holistic approach and evolving our contact center ecosystem to meet our customers’ needs. For example, our BMO Assist chatbot played a vital role during our recent acquisition and integration of Bank of the West. During the old, but we were able to get very proficient in a short period of time. That’s a testament to the technology itself and how quickly our team members and customers adapted to the tool. 

What are some of the main self-service opportunities AI can provide for customers? 

AI is poised to improve self-service opportunities and offer customers more convenience via the channels they choose. The technology can help customers complete some of the most common interactions with their bank, like funds transfers, viewing account balances or card activation. There’s also the potential of leveraging the chatbot to surface frequently asked questions, providing yet another way for us to empower our customers. However, as with the implementation of any technology, you still need humans as part of the larger customer care ecosystem—and it’s important to note, BMO Assist makes it easy to connect with a banker of your choice in real time during office hours. We need the combination of powerful technology with humans’ contextual understanding of customer circumstances to continue enhancing the banking experience. 

How do you monitor the performance of the technology itself?  

We’re always looking to enhance the tool, not from just a speed or technology perspective, but in terms of the services that it can provide. So, we regularly gather feedback from our teams, including conducting listening sessions with management heavily involved. That way, colleagues can best share any questions, concerns and recommendations. It’s crucial to have those who actively use the technology share their experiences in the same room with those who can actually approve and implement those changes. We want to understand what the common issues are for customers, what gaps we need to fill and whether we do it with the technology itself or with our products and services. Speech analytics also allow us to analyze recordings and transcripts of calls for QA and performance reviews. 

Sang Kim is the head of U.S. Virtual Connect and Customer Advocacy at BMO. 

Read more best practice recommendations in the BAI Special Report “Leveraging AI with Human Capital.”