Harness the Power of AI for Call Centers

Today’s financial customers expect real-time support, personalized service, and 24/7 availability — all without sacrificing the human touch. As conversational AI becomes more embedded in everyday life, those expectations now extend to call centers, not just chatbots or mobile apps.

To keep pace, banks and credit unions are integrating AI into their contact centers — not to replace agents, but to empower them. When implemented strategically, AI can handle routine inquiries, reduce wait times, and ensure seamless handoffs to live agents for complex or sensitive issues. The result is a smarter, more responsive customer experience built on both efficiency and empathy.

From boosting agent performance to enabling self-service and capturing customer insights, here’s how AI is transforming financial contact centers — and what your institution stands to gain.

AI: A Game-Changer for Customer Experience

Traditional call centers have long faced limited resources and high demand. This is particularly true for 24/7 financial services contact centers, where agents often find themselves flooded with calls and requests. Without the resources, tools, and workflows to support them, these agents can only do their best to juggle competing priorities — and too often, this leaves customers frustrated by long wait times and knowledge loss between calls or channel transfers.

That’s why many financial services institutions have turned their attention to AI call center software. Through AI integration, they can improve everything from customer relationship management to actionable insights gleaned from each customer query.

Of course, contact center AI is far from a new concept. Although the pandemic was a catalyst for many digital transformations across the financial services sector, AI was already somewhat familiar. However, as generative AI, conversational AI, and other tools become more commonplace in everyday life, customers and human agents alike have fast-growing expectations for quality assurance, accuracy, immediacy, and more.

Today, contact centers are evolving rapidly, and AI is at the center of that transformation. According to Deloitte’s 2024 global survey of contact center leaders, 1 in 6 organizations have already deployed generative AI across key use cases like agent assistance, virtual agents, and interaction summarization.

These early adopters are seeing measurable impact: they’re 34% less likely to report agents feeling overwhelmed by information, and they report stronger performance in metrics like customer effort scores, agent productivity, and self-service deflection.

Even beyond generative AI, 80% of organizations plan to invest in improved self-service and analytics, and more than 80% already use speech and text analytics to understand customer behavior and improve service delivery.

Although it’s clear that AI call center solutions come in many forms, some of the most significant progress is being made in these areas:

1. Empowering Live Agent Performance

Artificial intelligence scaffolds and supports human intelligence. AI solutions simplify tasks, streamline workflows, minimize manual effort, and make accessing the right information at the right time easier. And it’s not just call centers or financial services institutions: Adobe research found that 92% of workers across all industries say AI technology has a positive impact, with 26% calling it a “miracle.” 

Top-reported benefits include saving time, completing tasks faster, and reducing tedious work. By deploying agent assist functionalities in an AI contact center setting, agents can quickly resolve complex issues and personalize interactions based on each customer query, while the system handles routine inquiries behind the scenes.

2. Enabling Self-Service

Self-service solutions put financial customers in charge of their own experiences, allowing them to quickly address their needs without burdening your call center. AI only enhances these self-service opportunities, putting advanced functionality right at a customer’s fingertips on any channel. This blend of natural language and voice AI technology ensures rapid, accurate responses, even without direct human interaction.

For example, research from McKinsey indicates that, in some cases, the right AI technology can boost self-service utilization by up to 300%. This can also generate a 20% reduction in cost-to-serve and a 40% reduction in service interactions. Leveraging chatbots or a virtual agent ensures customers can quickly get help, from answering basic questions to automating entire workflows.

3. Collecting Customer Data

Customer data represents a wealth of insights for any financial services call center, but gathering that data can be time-consuming and difficult. AI automatically turns every conversation, interaction, and touchpoint into an opportunity to learn how your contact center is utilized and how it could be improved. 

With natural language processing at the core, AI bots and conversational AI chatbots can capture nuanced details about customer queries, enabling sentiment analysis and revealing hidden trends that inform future strategies.

The Benefits of Using AI in Call Center Operations

No matter how you choose to leverage AI software, you can expect a variety of benefits and competitive advantages for your contact center. These include:

24/7 Customer Service

Even when your human agents aren’t available, an AI-based call center can address customer needs through intelligent conversations. That means your customers can perform banking tasks anytime, anywhere — making your contact center a critical extension of your brand and a key driver of trust, loyalty, and service continuity. Plus, your live agents will have fewer urgent issues and competing priorities when they are available, making it easier for them to focus on delivering empathetic service for every customer issue. 

Operational Efficiency

Eliminate waste and streamline operations with smarter, faster, more efficient processes empowered by AI. You’ll quickly gain a competitive advantage over financial institutions that haven’t mastered the balance between AI and human support for customer inquiries, interactions, and requests. 

You’ll also eliminate many of the costs and inefficiencies associated with traditional call centers — especially when it comes to limited staffing resources. AI integration also lends itself to advanced customer relationship management, as every customer query can be captured and analyzed in real time.

Seamless Customer Experience

Omnichannel experiences are critical for financial customers. In fact, 73% of consumers expect a seamless transition between channels, but only 13% think their financial institutions deliver. If knowledge is lost when a user switches between channels or if experiences are disjointed and disparate, the entire customer experience can suffer. 

Fortunately, AI makes it far easier for systems (and the agents that use them) to retain information across channels, even when escalating from artificial to live service. Additionally, the right AI software can help you make different channels feel unique while maintaining a sense of cohesion across all your institution’s digital offerings. Voice bot technology, intelligent virtual agents, and other AI solutions create continuity regardless of where the conversation starts.

Streamlined Data Analysis

Every customer interaction can become a valuable insight if you have a system capable of turning data into actionable information. Of course, the right AI tool doesn’t just capture data; it offers analytic frameworks that enable you to extract relevant points based on context, goals, needs, and more. 

For example, if chatbots frequently get questions about a particular service, you could learn:

• Whether your guidance, marketing, or education around this service is underperforming.
• Which services are more popular than others.
• Which demographics are interested in a particular service.
• What a potential customer is looking for in this service.

Through sentiment analysis and other AI capabilities, you can transform these insights into tangible improvements. This creates a continuous feedback loop of refinement and enables a truly data-driven contact center approach.

Simpler Lead Generation

Although lead generation can take many forms with AI tools, one of the most effective and low-touch solutions is to let your self-service tools do the work for you. If an existing customer asks one of several predetermined questions, you could automatically flag this account as a possible cross-sell or upsell opportunity. You might also have it forwarded straight to a live agent through your contact center. 

The same is true for potential customers or first-time visitors: You can identify their intentions and respond with the most appropriate offer or service. This seamless handoff between your virtual agent and human agents ensures that a mere customer query can evolve into a deeper conversation and a timely offer.

Reduced Overhead

The traditional call center may be expensive to operate, but it can’t be entirely eliminated. AI solutions allow you to keep what works and improve what doesn’t — particularly when it comes to operational costs. For example, Gartner expects conversational AI deployments to cut agent labor costs by $80 billion in 2026. An AI-based call center can more efficiently address routine inquiries while ensuring escalations get the attention they deserve, ultimately optimizing resources.

Top AI Solutions for Contact Centers

Every financial institution has unique needs in its contact center. That’s why the ideal AI solutions must be flexible, intuitive, and effective. Here are three examples:

Interactive Voice Response

An AI Voice Assistant enhances contact center operations with automatic speech recognition, leveraging conversational AI technology to respond intelligently and effortlessly. 24/7 availability and seamless call routing help support your live agent team when necessary — all while delivering exceptional experiences to callers and saving relevant customer data. 

Your company could handle millions of calls without a live agent, reducing the cost of overflow calls by 63%, speed-to-answer by 92%, and abandon rates by 93%. By relying on advanced speech recognition and voice AI, your institution can deliver accurate, human-like interactions and accelerate resolution times.

Intelligent Virtual Agents

With Digital Assistant, a conversational AI chatbot, customers can handle self-service needs from basic questions to more involved financial tasks. You can customize these interactions to meet specific needs or deliver unique outcomes — and if a customer needs more help, Digital Assistant can reroute the conversation to a live agent with full context and a complete transcript. 

That means you could handle 100% of after-hours chats, potentially saving thousands of dollars and labor hours. Intelligent virtual agents not only process natural language but also adapt to different conversation styles, increasing customer satisfaction through contextual understanding.

Knowledge Assistants

Give your live agents the support they need with Knowledge Assistant. This conversational interface delivers immediate answers to agent queries, cutting search time by 93% and improving employee productivity and satisfaction in your call center. 

Plus, Knowledge Assistant can help gather insights on searches, query effectiveness, bot accuracy, and more, delivering the data you need to constantly improve your processes. With robust AI integration, it can serve as the backbone of a comprehensive customer relationship management strategy, surfacing relevant data in real-time.

Want to see AI in action? Learn how FirstLight Federal Credit Union uses Posh to enhance customer experience.

Discover What AI Can Do for Your Call Center

With many employees and customers expecting AI at every turn, your financial institution can’t afford to fall behind. Fortunately, a variety of AI solutions are available to address your needs, deliver top-notch experiences, and optimize your call center operations. For organizations looking to leverage conversational AI in BPO relationships, these same tools enable consistent, personalized support across outsourced channels while maintaining strict service level agreements.

Posh’s AI offerings — plus our experience supporting banks and credit unions — make us the perfect partner for your digital transformation efforts. We’re here to help your agents (and your financial customers) do more. 

By tapping into advanced capabilities such as agent assist tools, virtual agent solutions, and voice bot technologies, your call center can reduce wait times, increase customer satisfaction, and gather valuable data that scales with your future needs.

Request a demo today to experience what Posh can do for you and your customers.