Getting Customer Engagements Right Through Decision Powered Interactions

Inflation is wreaking havoc on the economy making everything more expensive from petrol to buying groceries. The consequences are driving up default rates for consumer borrowing including credit cards and mortgages, even personal bankruptcy. Recent figures from the Bank of England show they expect a rise in the number of consumers struggling to repay credit cards and other loans amid growing concern over soaring living costs.

This will undoubtedly create headaches for financial institutions as they brace for a deluge of engagements from clients seeking financial guidance. There are simply not enough customer service agents with the right skills available to respond to clients seeking advice through multiple contact channels. Furthermore, the expertise required to deliver such advice is far too complex to automate using chatbots or digital assistants. A way to stay ahead of this emerging tsunami and to overcome the technology limitations is through using “decision-powered customer interactions”.

So, what exactly are decision-powered customer interactions? They are the result of capturing and automating people’s expertise, decision-making, and advisory skills using a no-code software. By doing so, you can automate the skills required to analyze personal financial circumstances, affordability, and the narrowing down of the options available to clients based on their circumstances. This automated expertise can then be delivered through existing customer contact channels (agent-mediated, web, chat, digital assistants, etc.).

Making this a reality and the “next frontier” in intelligent automation is possible but three fundamental challenges remain.

• First, most software tools have a very limited range of techniques for capturing decision expertise. For example, most decisioning software tools only support industry standard Decision Model and Notation (DMN) decision table formats, which is inadequate. To capture and automate the breadth of expertise required to provide advisory, assessment, classification, diagnostic, troubleshooting, planning, and selection all requires a access to a more powerful toolset including decision tables, decision flows, decision trees, rules, and predictive machine learning.
• Second, to power complex customer interactions means deploying this digitally captured decision expertise through all contact channels to create unique and tailored customer experiences. Unfortunately, most decisioning software tools don’t have omni-channel support capabilities. Outputting an SMS message to the customer will not suffice.
• Finally, to harness the data that resides across your systems of record to make decisions that are both personalized and optimized for that specific interaction has historically required data-science. There are two issues in operationalizing this. The first is that the customer environment is dynamic, and constantly changing. Keeping up with these changes requires a significant ongoing investment. And secondly, in many cases data-science models are black-boxes that deliver high-levels of accuracy with low levels of transparency. This is a problem for financial services institutions, as the audit trail is often required to maintain regulatory and compliance standards.

Automation of complex customer interactions brings specialist core competency knowledge to the fore, creating a connection between front, middle and back-office operations that is seamless to the end customer. By automating workflows and decisioning fulfillment actions properly, organizations can for the first time gain a holistic 360 view of all client activities.

To really put decision powered customer interactions in the spotlight, here is a quick video on how an insurance claim can be automated end-to-end using XpertRule.
 

This all ties back to the increasing surge in financial default rates because decision-powered customer interactions are about automating each and every financial interaction and customer transaction. This is a disruptive and transformational automation capability that goes way beyond a quick ROI or reduction in headcount.

Our Viabl.ai software is different. It makes it possible for non-technical people to automate complex workflows through low-code software. You don’t need software developers, or IT involved every step of the way. That’s why we say “no data scientist required” when working with XpertRule. We help amplify the impact automation projects can have within an organization because every business decision can be captured, audited, and optimized.

Decision automation is at the heart of enhancing customer interactions and delivering a differentiated customer experience whilst simultaneously increasing efficiency and improving productivity. A lever for delivering value to both top and bottom line.