How can you perfect the balance between AI and human interactions in your banking contact center? You need to learn how each learns from the other.
Picture your contact center for a moment. Are your agents spending valuable time on routine tasks that could be automated? Are they struggling to access the information they need in real-time? If you’re nodding your head, you’re not alone—but there’s a transformation happening that you need to understand.
🤔Let’s play a game. One question, and you have to answer it immediately. Ready?
Q: What is the relationship between humans and AI in today’s banking contact center?
Was your first thought any of the following?:
- AI is about eliminating the need for human interactions to create greater efficiency.
- Humans need to manage AI to make sure it isn’t doing/saying anything wrong.
- AI is designed to monitor (spy on) humans and catch them doing something wrong.
These concerns are natural, but they’re based on an outdated view of AI’s role. Today’s reality is far more exciting:
Humans and AI have the capability to make each other MUCH smarter,
to the benefit of all.
In a unified banking contact center operation, the quality and efficiency of both human agents and AI agents can be instantly improved, based on how each learns from the other. And once you see how this relationship works, we hope you’ll put some more thought into the unification strategy of AI for AllTM.
How AI Learns From Humans
Of course, at the most practical level, AI is a blank slate that learns only what it’s “fed” and what it can find on its own. But as contact center specific AI tools have matured, the best have already learned just about everything there is to know when it comes to interacting with customers of banks, credit unions, insurance companies and other businesses where compliance and security are paramount. It turns out, customer requests are extremely consistent across banking specifically. No matter the institution, people will always need to change their address or order new checks. So, AI built for these industries can almost be used right out of the box. This is great news for organizations that are just now starting to think about their AI strategy–you’ve come at a good time.
A unified AI-powered contact center platform can quickly assess each interaction and then identify whether it can be resolved through virtual assistance. If so, the customer gets an instant answer or resolution to their issue—no human was needed for this one—and it’s a five-star experience. Because it was automated, the cost of that interaction was practically zero.
Our Glia Virtual Assistants (GVAs) were purposefully constructed for financial institutions and come pre-trained on over 900 routine inquiries. It’s already been taught. And it’s a great student. Once the GVA learns how to handle a common task, interactions are immediate and accurate every time. No risk of hallucination.
From simple address changes to complex account management, GVAs handle the full spectrum of financial services interactions. For example, when a customer needs to order new checks, the GVA doesn’t just process the request—it proactively verifies the shipping address, confirms the style preference, and updates account records—all in seconds
Much more than a chatbot, a mature virtual assistant expedites resolutions for specific issues, offloading live volume and achieving a high rate of containment.
RLHF: Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback
What about the rest of the interactions? Those that can’t be contained by an AI virtual assistant.
An emerging practice within the science of AI learning is the study of the feedback loop between humans and AI. This is RLHF. Think of RLHF as your contact center’s own apprenticeship program, where your top performers unconsciously train your virtual team members through their daily excellence. Every customer interaction is an opportunity for a virtual assistant to learn. And who better to learn from than a contact center’s strongest human agents.
With Glia Learning 360, our GVAs can learn from the actual conversations and expertise of a contact center’s highest performers. It listens and analyzes what top performers are doing and saying differently from others. It is continuously learning from every new interaction, and is constantly evolving. It “hears” their expertise and learns the best practices, tone and specific phrasing used by the most effective human representatives. Those insights are then surfaced for contact center leaders to review and approve before officially transferring that knowledge to the active GVA.
Think about it this way: If the goal is to learn from the wisdom and experience of your best people, shouldn’t they be rewarded and recognized? What an honor to contribute your own excellent skills to the benefit of others. Those individuals who are “teaching” virtual assistants how to create better interactions (just from their own personal performance) should be hailed as heroes. What better way to learn, than to learn from the best? Seems too good to be true? It was, until now.
How Humans Learn From AI
✨The true magic happens when we flip the script. Instead of viewing AI as a replacement, successful organizations are using it as a performance multiplier.
Reinforcements have arrived
The best way to think about the maturity of AI tools for banking contact center operations is to look skyward and say “finally!” Now you have a host of virtual assistants who are here to help you, standing by at the ready so that you and your team can become smarter and more successful.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but it’s worth repeating until it becomes standard strategy:
The percentage of human-only interactions your organization is doing should be = 0%.
Yes. Zero. 🤯About half of all interactions can now be fully automated, and all the rest–the ones that require a human–should be done by humans whose performance is being elevated by non-customer-facing virtual assistants.
Elevating the Profession
The job of being a customer service agent (or rep, or CSR, or Associate) is instantly elevated by virtual assistants that are setting the agent up for success in every interaction. By offloading boring and routine tasks, providing real-time information and suggestions, and streamlining the entire process, companies are enabling their humans to be more human. When a human agent is able to give 100% of their attention and humanity to a customer (because AI is taking care of all the background work), that feels different–for both parties. That’s a human connection being made. That’s what a five-star experience feels like.
Imagine your human agents having instant access to:
- Customer interaction history at their fingertips
- Real-time compliance guidance
- Predictive next-best-action recommendations
- Automated post-call documentation
The job of being a banking contact center manager has traditionally been hard, the hassle factor is high, and the rewards are few and far between. But thanks to new AI tools and functionality, you can now automate many of the laborious and repetitive tasks that used to take up so much managerial time. You now have instant access to comprehensive insights that formerly went undiscovered. You can quickly drill into interactions and uncover personalized coaching insights that make you more strategic and effective. Instead of just being a supervisor or manager your role is now elevated to that of a leader.
The job of being a senior leader or executive requires a lot of hard decisions. You’re swimming in a sea of data, and sometimes it feels like you’re hanging onto a piece of driftwood. But you should be comforted that there are now AI tools that sit by your side to keep you afloat. They provide instant and accurate responses to any question you’ve ever had about performance management and reporting. You can extract insights previously buried within unstructured data. You can make data-driven decisions that change the economics of your function. It’s time to elevate your role by making your job a little easier and enabling you to get the recognition and appreciation you deserve.
The Time for AI-Human Synergy In The Banking Contact Center Is Now
The future of exceptional customer service isn’t about choosing between AI and humans—it’s about mastering their collaboration. Organizations that perfect this balance today will lead their industries tomorrow.
Ready to transform your contact center operations? Let’s explore how Glia’s AI for All™ approach can elevate your customer experience while empowering your team.
