Dialling up the future of call centres at banks

Singapore

HERE'S a peek into the future of customer centres at banks.

An online transaction fails to go through, and right there and then, the bank will send the customer a chat message, a text, or an e-mail, before having him or her ring up the bank to deal with the problem.

If an ATM swallows up the debit card, the bank will likewise inform the customer and have a new card sent, without the customer having to hit the call button first.

Singapore's largest bank is trying to reinvent the call centre - a service point that at most places is commonly associated with times of irritation as customers sort out their banking woes by waiting to get a human voice on the other end of the line.

For that, DBS has spent some S$10 million over the last five years, in part to be increasingly more personalised in handling customers' needs that are typically associated with a call to the customer centre. But the investment has also helped in more immediate ways. DBS has moved 90 per cent of its employees at its customer centre here - likely the largest with 650 staff - to work from home amid the Covid-19 outbreak, said Kailash Ramalingam, regional head of contact centre and servicing platforms at the bank.

The transition began in February, when Singapore raised its Dorscon alert level from yellow to orange, and accelerated through March, he told BT.

While Covid-19 has been the biggest trigger of change for many companies, DBS itself began thinking about how the bank can move its call-centre staff to work from home because of the social unrest in Hong Kong, a key market for the bank. It raised the question: what would DBS do if customer service staff were unable to go into the office?

Then the virus pandemic hit, pushing these plans into overdrive mode.

This meant ensuring an upgrade in bandwidth on the virtual private network, that phone calls can be done on secured lines, and via a system that integrates "live" chats, voice biometrics, and other services needed for staff to work on the fly. Staff were also retrained to take on new roles, such as in using "live" chats. This strategy moves beyond a typical business continuity plan because the bank has also worked to create what DBS calls "hyperpersonalisation". An algorithm runs in the background boasting of a 70 per cent predictive accuracy on why customers would call, said Mr Ramalingam.

The bank looks at, among other things, transaction patterns, demographics, right down to the time spent by customers on the digibank app. "Every customer exhibits some kind of habit," he said.

With most of the call-centre staff working from home today, they are also using that information to help guide customers to taking up digital options to solve their problems.

Typically, about 20,000 calls a month are migrated digitally. This means that after taking a call with the customer, the staff successfully guides the customer to a digital option such that the customer does not call back after seven days with a similar or related query.

These days, more have been moving to digital. In April, 39,000 calls were migrated digitally. In May, this has gone up to 40,000 calls. Customer satisfaction has increased in April from a year ago, as well.

Part of the reason for higher digital migration, is that amid the lockdown, customers are also "more open" to try out digital services now, said Mr Ramalingam.

Even before the virus outbreak, DBS already has seen a fall in call volumes. As at May 2019, the bank saw a 12 per cent fall in call volumes over the previous year, and said then that it expected call volumes to drop another 20 per cent over the next three years.

And the bank will focus its investment on reskilling staff to handle more "live" chats, or in analysing customers' transaction patterns to predict issues that customers may face in their banking transactions.

"Amazon has been our aspiration to achieve," said Mr Ramalingam.

The changes to workflow also mean that call-centre staff who are working from home now have added flexibility. If their child is coughing in the background, staff can do "live" chats instead of handling calls.

To be clear, even as the bank is moving more customers from calls to digital options, calls are handled when triggered, with the bank aware of the greater distress that some customers may be experiencing in these times.

In this season of uncertainty, callers are asking about Covid-19 relief measures. After taking calls from customers to tackle the immediate problems at hand, call-centre staff are actively directing customers to a specific website where customers can apply for relief directly.

Beyond being empathetic to the struggles, staff will still take calls if the digital option remains a struggle for some. "We would never force a customer to go digital," said Mr Ramalingam.