Q&A with Simmons Bank’s Nick Kieffer: Invest in talent and you’ll invest in customers

A version of this article first appeared in BAI’s June Executive Report: Elevating customer service across the enterprise. You’ll find insightful coverage in the issue on SMB customer care, practical AI use, customer-focused SaaS designed for the financial sector, plus much more.

Contact center teams know as well as any department within the bank how much job satisfaction matters.

These staffs face mental and physical demands that often track with the tension customers bring to stressful calls, elevated by the sensitive nature of money transactions, fraud scares or what could be technological gaps in understanding processes.

Keeping the talent satisfied and growing within the organization can pay off as it means making the most of productivity gains that can cut down on turnover costs. Plus, strong customer service feeds cross-promotional revenue opportunities. In other words, happy agents tend to mean happy customers.

Evidence points to calls centers increasingly successfully leveraging technology to streamline workflows, automate mundane tasks, and generally speeding up processes so that both customer and agent are satisfied with the level of engagement. Just as important is how banks and credit unions treat talent after they’ve set down the headset. Companies are investing more in employee wellness programs, which might include access to counseling services, work-life balance apps, ergonomic desk setups and more.

BAI Senior Editor Rachel Koning Beals talked with Nick Kieffer, senior vice president, who leads customer service, with the $27 billion Simmons Bank, operating 230 financial centers across Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, about his approach.

BAI: Amid staff-size optimization, industry consolidation, fintech competition and ever-present budget considerations, what’s top of mind in your department to attract and retain talent?

Kieffer: We’ve had some success with virtual job fairs where we hire a larger group of [contact center] agents who can go through training together, building camaraderie that we hope will keep them engaged with each other and at Simmons Bank. And we recognize high performance with a monthly incentive for hitting targets related to schedule adherence, productivity and quality.  And we articulate paths to promotion where an associate understands that if they hit their targets for a given period, they can earn a promotion with defined increase in pay.  This eliminates the guess work.

Next on our list is defining paths to other departments of the bank. This can be done through job shadowing and exposure to other roles. I firmly believe that if another area wants to hire someone from our group, there is no higher form of praise for the job we’ve done. Our agents’ roles provide them with more exposure to other departments than most, ultimately leading to a shorter learning curve in their new role.

BAI: We know that digital-first, yet omnichannel and personalized, banking defines our industry. How do you approach this at Simmons to keep training processes, and your talent, nimble, product-savvy and efficient?

Kieffer: This is challenging, as the job of a contact center agent rarely gets easier as banks continue to introduce new products or ways to interact in response to market expectations. Today, we focus on teaching our agents to find ways to add value to the conversation. We also look for ways to simplify processes and technical aspects of the job so they can retain new information. As an example of adding value, if a customer asks what the hours are at a branch location, we ask, “Why?” Going to the branch may not be the most convenient method of banking with us. For example, if the customer is simply wanting to make a deposit, the ATM or a mobile deposit might be preferable since those options are available 24/7.

BAI: Soft skills might be more important than ever. Talk about empathy training or other related skill-building.

Kieffer: Much of this is done through one-on-one coaching in reaction to customer survey responses about their interactions. In the past, our Quality Assurance team would review calls and provide their perspectives on whether the customer interaction included the appropriate soft skills. This often resulted in conflict between the reviewer and the agent, as soft skills are far more subjective than objective. Now, we’re using the voice of the customer to grade the agent, and that is not subjective, as their perception is reality.

We are also trying to ensure that we are personalizing our interactions, so they don’t sound robotic. We ask customers to validate this approach as part of our after-call surveys.

BAI: From contact center “green rooms” to staff-focused considerations generally, talk about nurturing the support, health and longevity of customer-facing talent.

Kieffer: I have believed for years that the job of an agent is the hardest job in the bank. To provide great customer service, they need to know our processes and technologies that each have their own unique user interface. [Agents] are then expected to interact with customers at a greater rate than almost any other role, and typically a customer is not calling us to tell us what a good job we’ve done. Customers typically have a problem or need that must be addressed, and they’re often emotional before they even contact our agents.

To address this, we have a culture team charged with trying to bring some fun to the job—celebrating holidays, coordinating spirit weeks and, once a year, we celebrate the whole team during Customer Service Week by showering them with food (always important), kudos and gifts. We have more to do, from improving their physical space to simplifying processes to the point they are more confident in what they’re doing, providing greater assurance to customers their requests will quickly be fulfilled.

BAI: Artificial intelligence and the quicker pickup of gen AI have shaped many discussions, and certainly organizations vary widely in where they find themselves on an AI path. In your department, how do you balance talent messaging around what must be a blend of concern and curiosity for upside potential?

Kieffer: The simple answer is, we need to embrace it! In the short term, we need to find ways to harness the technology to support agent interactions with real-time solutions to customer questions, simplifying their job. Long term, we need to utilize the tools we have been perfecting to support agents and allow customers to interact with the same knowledge base, solving issues for them 24/7, reserving human interactions to the most complex issues that AI is likely never going to solve.

Nick Kieffer is Senior Vice President, Customer Service, with Simmons Bank.

Rachel Koning Beals is Senior Editor with BAI.