hi I'm Vic hire of CIO marketing Services the customer contact center is fast becoming yet another element of business operations which can be reinvented amid a gold rush of digital Innovation customers accessing banking financial services and insurance expect speed and personalization so businesses will have to adopt technology such as artificial intelligence to meet expectations but digital transformation also enables the contact center to be a driver of business success deepening relationships through quality customer service in this webcast brought to you by CIO and AWS in partnership with cognizant we will discuss this topic with experts who have extensive experience on the subject and before we begin let's find out a little bit more about our speakers Roshan rert Murphy of Unum aws's naine ran and cognizance Hamond deera roosan perhaps you could start us off tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do hi everyone it's a privilege to be part of this great panel I'm Roshan ramam morti assistant vice president from unim insurance I've been in technology space for the last 20 years and I'm currently managing contact centers for unit I also damble a little bit in J projects this year and I'm excited to be part of this discussion thanks russan and same question to you n hi my name is naven Narayan I'm a principal solution architect here at AWS for the Amazon connect organization and I've been working with Amazon connect for approximately six years so and here at Amazon connect I help customers architect cloud-based contact center solutions that align to their current needs and help them scale as their business grows I'm happy to be here great thanks na Hera finally to you good morning everyone glad to be here this is hinda I'm the growth leader for strategic accounts within the life and retirement portfolio of cognizant have been Associated for for 25 years and worked across multiple carriers through their transformation Journey thank you thank you hinter so in this era of rapidly changing customer expectations what are the challenges facing contact centers in the financial services Banking and insurance sector and Russia perhaps you can start us off sure we are right in the middle of the digital transformation age right so there's rapidly changing customer expectations again primarily driven by the technological advancements uh it does take like strong leadership to prioritize customer preferences balancing it with the right choices of arch architecture technology security and Regulatory guidelines of course customer Centric approach is the only way to go but you have to bundle it up with your core values of the business and the goals you want to achieve with your business thank you ran and the V what are your thoughts on this one for sure thank you Vic so um Insurance like all other Industries we are observing is on a multi decade transformational move into more of a digital business right there's three areas we see this impacting there is the need for digital channels where insurers are acknowledging that the way they interact with customers and policyholders must change uh a byproduct of this is that the ability to G gain a greater customer Insight through analyzing digital interactions the second thing we see is that there is a new approach to identifying risk insurers are accessing broader data sets including more external and unstructured data and this is uh used to enrich historical information about their customers and it's helping them identify patterns helping them clearly identify areas of risk and also factor that into their future and the third one is the burden of Legacy infrastructure we see 70% of it budget Still Remains relegated to maintaining existing systems while simultaneously seeing that compute for example with us like AWS compute is becoming more of a utility lastly I'd like to point out regulat compliance is also a very significant expense drivers as regulatory oversight continues to expand hope that answers that's great na some really interesting points there Amer what would you add here oh thank you Vic and Na and ran covered it very well um me what we are seeing in the industry is that the traditional call centers are becoming more like a digital experience Center where earlier it used to be only voice channels uh eventually became Omni Channel and now it is in next genx experience which is a combination of the cognitive Solutions intelligent customer service analytics contextualization of the knowledge combination with the Round the Clock uh availability of the context centers along with the right experience at the right time um the other thing component which which we are seeing it is the uh effective utilization of the data and the database strategies which includes the data storage um the data responsiveness uh enabled for the hyper personalization so uh uh definitely the contact centers maturity is a key uh uh objective uh transformation objective for the carriers thank you there's obviously a lot going on in this sector uh some businesses may feel that in tough Economic Times They don't wish to invest in a transformation program but their customers may become alienated so what are the dangers of being left behind navine can I come to you for sure hi so across the clients we serve we're seeing that younger generation of insurance customers have higher expectations for how easy it'll be to interact with their insurance carrier right there's a diminishing loyalty towards Brands the loyalty lies within the experience not within the brands we also see that uh competition from new fintech entrance and traditional players is at all-time high consumers have more Choice than they've ever had in the past so when you contrast these headwinds with the benefits of moving to the cloud an infrastructure that can scale as your business grows a set of services that you that you can easily adapt uh and and scale the decision to move to the cloud it to me it seems like a natural progression for businesses that aim to be a part of this transformation yeah a really interesting point of loyalty there um and and rosan what would you add on on this particular point I couldn't agree more uh with what just na said all so resisting technology and Innovation May yield you a shortterm savings right but you're going to lose out in the long term uh financial services are very competitive space uh neglecting technology and process improvements can lead to an outdated experience for your customers and also we have seen this happen during pandemic many businesses were not ready for the digital Aid simply disappeared right embracing transformation modernization makes you your business more resilient and and you'll be like better equipped to Pivot and provide better strategies and offerings during tough times so there's no other way you've got to embrace technology and Innovation and it's changing very rapidly thanks r that that pandemic impact was was incredible wasn't it and Amer what would your be your thoughts here I would say the if the carriers or the customers are not taking an action it's it's it's a dangerous situation for themselves the brand credibility and the loyalty is going to be compromised in no time um and the second component is the high cost of operations the technology and the people uh uh perspective if the Investments not happen in this Economic Times um the other observation have been That these channels have actually helped assisted customers in improving their CET score and help address any iteration issues uh which happens in the contact center area so it's a way to go thank you Hera and so artificial intelligence has transformative potential for these centers so tell us why and theine like to come to you on that yeah so um we see that artificial intelligence or AI is significantly impacting contact centers in my experience over the last three or four years I see that more contact centers using AI tools uh than ever before there's been a massive jump in usage over the past year for example uh where I would see four out of 10 customers ask for artificial intelligence or AI 3 years ago I almost see nine out of 10 customers asking for AI and uh gen AI plans that AWS might have right there are several um operation there are several use cases that we are actively looking at for example using AI to understand customer preferences and provide meaningful recommendations for cross sell and upsell uh reducing agent and onboarding Time by understanding C Custer intents providing next best actions to the agent during a contact uh modeling data to understand patterns uh used for fraud detection optimize claims management and also last but not the least using AI power chat parts to help with FAQ and uh containment contact containment or even identifying a caller's intent and sentiment and allowing the businesses to apply unique rules to then treat them very personal treatment right so so as I mentioned earlier we see that younger generation of insurance customers have a higher expectation of how easy it'll be to interact with their career and there is diminishing loyalty to the brands the loyalty is with the ease of experience and AI acts right there it supports that ease of experience pattern and that's why in my perspective it's changing the face of customer experience thanks de Amer what would you add to this one yeah so um customer Journeys are getting orchestrated to personalize each interaction ISF specific to the context a is playing a bigger and a broader role it is an opportunity to develop the relationship and not only that uh uh ability to connect through the content that is relevant and uh compelling um AI recommendations enablement agent assistance authentication with the faster with the voice Biometrics customer sentiments tracking real time to drive next best actions uh AI um has all all the carriers across the contact center space have been purposing that particular technology and some are more mature than others uh but this is this is where the AI is going to play a bigger and a broader role thank you aminda and of course generative AI has added a new dimension uh to this topic tell us how it differs from so-called traditional Ai and why does that matter for the contact center nine perhaps you can pick up here for sure uh so let's look at the difference between generative AI or gen and traditional AI right the difference lies in the objective and the functioning right where the traditional AI aims to perform specific task based on predefined rules and predefined patterns generative AI goes One Step Beyond those limitations and it strives to create new data that resembles human created content the keyword is resembling human created content I see that gen is transforming both the agent experience and a policyholder experience for example in traditional AI we saw digital tools not being fully adopted by agents until they add meaningful value to their experience but with Gen we see both new and tenured contact center agents benefiting from customer insights newer agents ability to learn from experience agents is limited genni removes that barrier it makes new agents more productive learn from the mistakes and the behaviors of their of tenured counterparts it captures more interaction data from experience agents so when it comes to customer experience we see jna and natural language conversational experience providing a 24x7 customer service through intelligent chatbots VC technology enabling continuous product improvement from customer insights and last uh not the least I it helps customers by creating a very personalized communication design and next product to buy recommendation for example outb marketing emails website content Etc hope that thank you uh n and and I really can can understand it really has a potentially powerful impact Hera what would you add to this one yeah any any has taken out the contact center space with programs that enable agents to deliver to the customers but as we move forward customer demands is personalization this is where gen can accelerate the performance it is not just confined to the rules that are f it is dynamic in nature helping to generate outputs or make decisions autonomously generative a has the potential to help further reduce handle times and increase first call resolution by improving agent efficiency and accuracy when responding to customer issues for example if a customer calls to inquire about the medical claim the llm will leverage information about the claim policy the hospital details payment terms from the internal repository as well external channels to provide the agent with a comprehensive response and next actions to help resolve the customers issues um CH is going to be the basically the cloud over all the platforms and Technologies going forward and every Investments across the carriers is going to be influent how this technology can bring an evolution and revolution in their ecosystem thank you am Russian your business has had a really fascinating Journey so can you give us some sight into what problems or challenges you have solved with AI absolutely um AI is embedded in every Cogan view of Amazon connect right so you cannot Escape AI while using AWS services and also Amazon connect right from the customer experience side of things when we get a contact finding the intent of the call or a chat or an email routing to the right channel which Preference they want to deflect that particular intent so that we can service them in a faster accurate Manner and also finding the right cue for contacts like that and also providing Self Service options all these are embedded with AI capabilities to make things more efficient of course from the agent experience side you got autoc categorization of calls you have the customer sentiment being real time fed to the agent also deducting customer profiles like uh where where does this customer live from your CRM systems point of view also finding the right workflow or knowledge article relevant to the conversation all can be done in real time using yeah and we have used it we have seen the value of it coming out and uh the operation side of things routing is largely in AI right now with Amazon connect it determines where to take the contact with you to which agent all being determined behind the SC we don't see it doesn't mean the AI doesn't exist so so there are programs running behind the scenes to take care of the routing which is an intelligent routing with an Amazon pic you also got wfo capabilities helping you with the forecasting Staffing quality management creating automatic Evolutions the list is endless right so moving to Amazon connect not only helped us with the platform migration moving away from our Legacy system but provided a huge push and a positive change in embracing AI as part of our day-to-day operations thank thank you russan uh for taking us through that story really interesting um and I just wonder how will technological developments and capabilities like generative AI further transform contact centers and amender can I come to you on this one um let us dive into the ABC's of a contact center um a agent experience B business experience and see customer experience um if you look into that uh the Gen use cases for ABC um on the agent side it is all around the knowledge asist uh transition and Native responses realtime script guidance automated call summarization post call next best actions um these are the common themes which we are seeing it across the carriers is is picking up extensively and the right right level of use cases now if I look into the extreme end which is on the customer experience side it goes into the campaign personalization Dynamic digital experiences um humanized conversational Ai and the fraud prevention um the marriage between the agent and the customer is basically the business experience and that business experience includes how the scoring or quality of these interactions should be um how do I utilize the the BS effectively um the dynamic surveys which I can do it based on the data uh uh code virtualization agents zero touch experiences on own boarding are are some of the multiple opportunities which exist in the in the world of gen impact on the uh Contex Center transformation and nine what would you say on this particular topic yeah so um I see generative AI transforming Legacy contact center models in some very significant ways for example it's going it's enabling intelligent business decisions and faster goto market and it's optimizing call centers by leveraging Auto cognitive sales agent providing contact summarization as Vic mentioned uh as harinder mentioned sorry uh to seamlessly Harvest learnings and apply them to improve the overall quality of the experience lastly I see um it it is improving customer experience by enhancing digital self-servicing portal and self-learning chat parts to expedite manual processing through intelligent interventions so those are three areas where I see generative AI transform in Legacy context that are models thank you n and Ros what would you add to this yeah I couldn't agree more with nain and hinder um gen is going to be our logical evolution in the contact center space we have seen our tradition contact center uh we've gone to Cloud we have Dani I think J is the next step in the journey uh we're going to see a huge positive impact that capabilities like content generation and summarization uh we utilized to answer customer queres right and it can go against unstructured data which is a huge when we don't have that capability right now um of course we can go against structure data as well but combining these both and providing responses which are more accurate and quicker to the customer it's going to be a massive win um the engineering hours are going to be drastically reduced to deliver these kinds of capabilities that's also a big wi that means you have speed to Market with accuracy and better capabilities um I predict the financial services ecosystem is going to be embedded with a lot of gen capabilities in the near future uh I have personally seen some yearly promises and positive results with this technology it's going to help the financial services sector with massive productivity Gates that's the key here and improving efficiencies within the internal processes needless to mention the customers are going to be delighted right with speed of answer and the accuracy of responses so this is our next step uh in the journey within contract Center yeah some really exciting times ahead I think and i' just like to find out uh more about the unique value realized from cognizant in partnership with AWS and Hima can you talk to that please no thank you so much and once again glad to be here because when I see AWS our customer uh this Cas Unum all coming together and talking about the technology Evolutions it also goes back into how do we work together and collaboratively together so um AWS and cognizant partnership has come a long way um cognizant is among the top three Global SI partner for AWS in digital customer experien of space and not only that cognizant is the only accredited uh Global essay for Amazon connect um uh apart from this cognizant has very in-house Engineering Suit for Amazon connect uh we have intelligent interaction um use cases consisting of almost 25 Plus Solution assets and connectors which we have built uh we have almost uh helped 25 plus clients with 10,000 plus agents in the transformation Journey um uh we have together come together great to standardize these contact center Technologies across the business units and migrate its Legacy and on promises customer service application to the cloud to reduce operational Co cost um yum is one such example where we have successfully decreased the average handling time and total cut total cost of operations on the whole um resulting into the uh customers which are very happy and uh uh have a good success in the net promoter sport so thank you thank you H and D and rosan what would you add on this particular Point um both AWS and cognizant have been my pillars right in the last three years within unum uh we started the contact center transformation journey together uh AWS have been our partners our Cloud partners and Na and team brought in their best to help us out with the migration uh we transformed uh 26 contact centers in 24 months so in a rapid Pace it it wasn't easy like every step of the way there were challenges thrown at us and we were able to solve coming out of it we were able to create lot of new design patterns with AWS and that became uh some became the best practices within AWS World and Other uh clients of theirs as well and cognizant are being our strategic Partners from the start um I still have the folks have been working three years back they started as a junior developer they are my tech leads now driving the contact centers and their inputs the the talent they brought in on board have been immensely helpful uh for us to run in parallel threats and deliver multiple projects uh in a record time so thankful to my partners in this call thanks russan that's really powerful Insight I think and as we come to the end of this webcast I'd like you all to share some final thoughts what key message uh would you give our audience and perhaps rosing you can stop definitely we spoke about AI we spoke about geni uh the most crucial aspect of this transformation is going to be the human and AI collaboration uh techn ol space has evolved for decades now and will continue to evolve there's no changing that the only aspect that will continue to not change is our ability to embrace Innovation and we have done that in the past we'll continue to do that um and we need to foster a collaboration with the technology uh and again prioritizing you know customer experience above everything else um with that I really would like to thank this panel for providing me an opportunity and creating a very healthy uh place for susp uh thank you thank you rosan Anda your final thoughts sure um digital AI gen has hit the mainstream and is a key differentiator in customer experience it has become essential for companies to explore new technologies try PCS Infuse the next in Tech as part of the product strategy uh contact centers are at the heart of the customer engagements and technology has vastly disrupted agent customer experience and the way business run operations and Drive analytics customer experience of a service with outcome based transformation is significantly gaining pace and there are huge benefits for clients to read as contact centers move from a cost center to the costan experience Center speed of innovation co-creation of digital products and AI driven personalization let's call gen AI driven personalization needs to be prioritized cognizant AWS can help our clients to stay ahead and drive future as we work as the we are working along with youum so glad to be here and thank you for the panel for having us thank youer n let's give you your chance for some final fils for sure thank you so um I'd say don't be afraid to try out technology we in AWS and my team in the Amazon connector we bring a significant experience in AI we bring a significant experience in generative Ai and we also bring a lot of experience in best practices we helped unim through their transformation as Roshan kindly mentioned and we're looking forward to share our expertise with other customers provide guidance on best practices and artificial intelligence Etc finally my personal recommendation is to understand what your key success metrics are and then test test test improve improve continuously so thank you very much for the for letting me speak here thank you very much for this panel and and my customers you know and cognizant thank you very much for letting me come here thank you nid and that does bring us to the end of this webcast on transforming the contact center I'd like to thank rosan hinder and nine for sharing their expert insight and of course everyone who tuned in please do take a look at the further information on your onscreen consoles to find out more and reach out to the contacts listed with any questions goodbye
2024-02-17