92 FEATURE if they have siloed departments or data that prevents agents from serving customers,” says Caile. “If so, they need to work with a technology provider to find a solution that will successfully surface the right data to agents at the right time. “Other considerations include how to effectively gather and share information with context from different departments, encouraging agent collaboration, and ensuring that customer data is secure and has the right biometric authentication at the frontline to build confidence that the customers are who they say they are.” For example, public finance organisations are using Nuance Gatekeeper to authenticate callers. The Australian Tax Office has significantly enhanced agent productivity by using the Nuance solution to validate the identities of Australia’s eight million citizens whenever they call its contact centre. “The office’s previous authentication process required customers to provide personal details or have the correct documentation available,” says Caile. “This was time consuming for contact centre agents, amounting to a total of 75,000 agent hours annually. We’re helping to reduce every call by an average of 48 seconds, allowing agents to get on with assisting citizens.” Partnering for enhanced productivity To provide frontline financial services staff with the contextual data they need to serve customers, firms need to streamline their information retrieval processes. They must also implement advanced technology solutions that enable seamless access to real-time customer information. An open architecture enables banks to interact with their data better, according to Dmitri Sedov, global head of data intelligence at London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), who explained how LSEG and Microsoft aim to reshape the future of finance at global financial services event Sibos in September 2023. Sedov highlighted how the two firms will deliver intelligent analytics solutions, available in Microsoft 365, to help financial services organisations improve the customer experience. In addition to developing artificial intelligence-driven self-service solutions to reduce incoming calls, banks will be able to unify their data by connecting with counterparts through Microsoft Teams and having access to data intelligence via Microsoft 365 Copilot. According to Microsoft, Copilot combs across an employee’s entire work data, including emails, meetings, chats, documents and more, along with the web, to provide a comprehensive view of their world. “Like an assistant, Copilot gets to know the employee, their job, and how they like to communicate," says Caile. “Copilot then saves time in areas such as summarising a meeting, searching for information and drafting emails. Contact centre agents should see improved efficiency with real-time coaching and prompts for the next best action, freeing them up to engage with customers.” One bank benefiting from Microsoft 365 Copilot is the United Overseas Bank (UOB), which is trialling the solution to increase the productivity of 300 of its employees. As part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program, UOB has begun to use the generative AI-powered tools to streamline processes for staff working across departments such as branches, customer service, technology and operations. The bank is already using Copilot capabilities to summarise documents and email threads in Microsoft Outlook and understand data in Excel. Alongside Nuance, LSEG and UOB, Microsoft has partnered with over 50 technology solution providers to empower workers in the financial services sector. Trade Ledger, for example, has developed a new AI-powered application, powered by Microsoft Azure, to provide financial UOB is using Copilot to summarise documents and email threads in Outlook to better serve its customers
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=