Banks hung on the line – Newspaper Kommersant No. 201 (7402) of 10/28/2022

In 2022, the quality of customer service for banks on the phone has plummeted, according to a Naumen study. This may be due to the complication of the current financial agenda against the backdrop of external sanctions and internal restrictions. At the same time, banks are more actively implementing voice assistants and chatbots. Clients do not like them too much, but bankers manage to reduce costs in this way.

Kommersant got acquainted with the Naumen study, according to which the quality of banking customer service by phone in 2022 has seriously fallen and is at its lowest level in five years. Thus, the share of calls in which the client’s issue was resolved the first time on the first or second line decreased by 7 p.p., to 92%. The waiting time for an answer to a call also increased: the share of received calls in the first 90 seconds fell by 8 p.p., to 69%.

Analysts cite the complexity of tasks as a possible reason for the deterioration in the quality of service: the emergence of a mass of acute and topical issues that have appeared this year in research and real life. These are transfers abroad and the work of SWIFT, commissions for receiving foreign exchange transfers, sanctions restrictions on cards, etc. Bank employees can still cope with them worse, says Valeria Chizhikova, head of customer service research at Naumen.

At the same time, banks are increasingly implementing robots in customer service: now almost every fourth organization (23%) uses them, while a year ago there were only 18%. But despite the expansion of the penetration of this channel, its level of return is low. The number of banks using voice assistants to process incoming calls has also grown, from 10% in 2021 to 15% in 2020.

In recent years, the load on remote forms of service has been growing very strongly, says Maxim Nalyutin, head of the group for working with financial institutions at DRT (formerly Deloitte). According to him, there are two types of voice assistants used by banks to handle incoming calls. “The old technology is voice self-service, where the client enters the menu and receives standardized information,” the expert explains. “A more intelligent and modern solution is a voice chat bot that has speech synthesis and is able to answer less standard questions.” According to him, bots can interact in a live dialogue with the client and allow both providing information and performing operations with products. “From the point of view of the bank, consultation with the help of a robot is cheaper than consultation with a living person,” emphasizes Maxim Nalyutin.

Most customers still prefer to contact the bank by phone, indicate in the PSB, and voice assistants save time. In a bank, calls to the contact center account for approximately 60% of calls. The main disadvantage of robots is that they cannot completely replace people. “Firstly, you need to hire first-class development specialists, have streamlined processes, have the right architecture and understanding of the base,” Alfa Bank explains. “Secondly, you need a deep understanding of your products.”

Experts believe that banks will continue to invest in the development of remote channels.

According to the partner of B1 group of companies (formerly EY in Russia) Gennady Shinin, banks will not sacrifice customer service, at least in the reasonably foreseeable future. “The country has a fairly large number of financial institutions,” the expert notes. “In the context of focusing primarily on the domestic market, competition will increase. And now, many banks, on the contrary, continue to work on improving customer journeys in the context of fierce competition in retail.”

Olga Sherunkova