FinTechTalk: Navigating Consumer Duty - strategies for customer and employee experience success

On 16 April 2024, FintechTalk host Charles Orton-Jones was joined by Gilles Talbot, Insurance Director EMEA, Genesys.

An overview of the Consumer Duty Act
Consumer Duty tells businesses to put the customer first, while customer centricity has been a priority for financial institutions anyway. It mandates financial institutions to provide services and products that cater to their clients’ needs, as well as provide customers support when they need it via communications that they understand, refraining from any jargon. Financial institutions also have to make sure that clients have an easy access to the right person when they have issues. What they are required to do is find a balance between offering digital self-service and connecting clients with the right agent. To comply with this new regulation, businesses can leverage AI-driven tools, especially with what is called “predictive routing.” Based on data, AI can infer from a customer’s profile which agent can be the best fit for them. 

How the scene is changing
Different types of AI can be deployed to achieve compliance. Predictive AI for routing and conversational AI in the form of chatbots. These are mature technologies now, but it’s important to remember that chatbots aren’t there to replace humans. Due to hallucinations and the lack of fully understanding context, ChatGPT is not ready for deployment in customer facing use cases. What GenAI can be used extensively for is summarising the calls that agents conduct with clients. As many as 45% of Blank clients can opt for self-service and sort out their inquiries with bots, provided the bots are cutting edge and trained for the specific context and with a 95% satisfaction score too. Speech recognition technology now enables the provision of services to blind people online, who, thanks to advancements in text-to-speech technology, can have the impression that they are talking to a real person. To measure the quality of the outcomes of calls with customers, measuring the time sent on call is not enough. You can monitor self-service customers and check how many of them were eventually escalated to a human agent in order to tell where the bottlenecks of the customer journey are. On the whole, there are no data privacy concerns when using platforms as they are GDPR compliant, and Genesys also has a dedicated team that ensures everything happens in a GDPR-compliant manner. 

The consumer duty act can be seen as a springboard to serving customers with a philanthropic approach. But many banks may still perceive customer service as an outsourced annoyance. However, it should be seen as the front door for customers to enter your business. What makes repercussions of unsatisfied customers more risky than previously is that now disgruntled customers can vet their frustrations on social media. 

A three-phase approach can be adopted to transform the organisation from bog standard into one that excels at consumer duty compliance. The first is standardisation, where multiple systems are merged into or replaced y one. Siloes of different communication channels must be dismantled so customers can switch between channels seamlessly. Standardisation involves implementing a unified platform where all interactions with customers take place. This phase is followed by optimisation. and innovation. Performance metrics there include policy and claim numbers instead of the customer experience. 

Insurance differs from banking in terms of using more legacy technology and having considerably less interactions with customers as products are bought in the hope that they won’t be needed. As technology required for consumer duty compliance is in the cloud, transforming a customer support centre that operates in line with regulations will only take weeks.

The panellists’ advice

• With enhanced routing technology, your average completion time will decrease too.
• If the bot can’t answer a customer query, you must make sure the case is escalated to the right agent.
• The perquisite of Customer Duty compliance is understanding your customers and they needs. 

To ask for a Genesys demo, click here.