Smarter contact center tech with human touch driving next gen customer experiences

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

4 Minute Read

This article was originally published in The Digital Banker on January 24, 2025. View full issue here: https://thedigitalbanker.com/magazine/

Demographics have changed dramatically over recent years. Evolving digital lifestyles play into the generational monikers for Millenials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha, and highlight differences between these tech savvy generations and more often digitally challenged seniors.

Despite this generational division, it’s clear that digital adoption rates vary even between Baby Boomers — and by country, meaning that frontline functions of customer care now need to perfect customer experiences across a broader range of engagement channels.

In the financial services industry, today’s banks and issuers are facing the same diverse expectations among their client base. One customer looking to report a stolen card may appreciate the opportunity to self serve through their mobile app, while another may prefer to verbalise their concerns over the phone, or potentially through online chat functionality. Either way, it’s clear that engagement with customers — on a channel that feels right for them — can help deliver a satisfactory customer experience.

But what can influential brands and contact centres do to perfect these experiences and take them to the next level of customer satisfaction?

While a multi-channel support strategy can serve the broad spectrum of customer care needs, a customer journey-first strategy will make the difference. In recognising today’s trend to communicate across different engagement channels, and literally switch touchpoints throughout the payment and customer service experiences, means that companies, such as TSYS, are adopting a smarter tech approach to automatically capture a 360° view of the customer journey and vital engagement history to ensure superior customer care handling and more personalised experiences.

This point of differentiation can successfully fortify brand loyalty and has been at the heart of TSYS Managed Services technology transformation as it evolves towards a more flexible Contact Centre as a Service (CCAS) model. With omni-channel support for customer service engagement across all areas of account servicing, fraud servicing, dispute management and digital payment experiences, customers can expect efficient responses via digital self-serving channels, or trained agents utilising TSYS Customer Services user interface and intuitive UX best practices.

Female customer service representative talking on headset to a customer

Next gen capabilities for contact centre of the future

For the increasing number of customers looking to quickly self serve through digital engagement channels, the implementation of smart AI and machine learning driven technology can deliver game changing performance improvements for rewarding customer experiences. Modern technology such as Robotics Process Automation (RPA) and AI-enabled capabilities such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), not only drive conversational chat functionality and improved decisioning but can also power speech analysis for sentiment to help with customer handling or raise flags for call centre fraud. With sophisticated fraud management services underpinned by smart machine learning algorithms and intelligent behavioral models, managed services agents are also able to elevate transaction defence and lead the fight against fraud with issuers and their customers.

However, customer success isn’t just reliant on smarter tech: smarter operational models also have a role to play. For example, with its evolution to cloud services, TSYS is successfully right-shoring its continued investment in modern customer experience tech. Empowering live agents with enhanced digitised tools and automation can also serve to support the hybrid workplace models and practices that TSYS successfully implemented during COVID with its award-winning customer service response. This ability to be agile when and where required is key to its robust contact centre model for the future, augmenting its existing physical contact centres across North America, Asia and Europe, including UK, Netherlands, Germany — and Prague with its Global Payments family.

Brand ambassadors with human touch

When an issuer’s customer reaches a managed service touchpoint they expect a quality experience consistent with their chosen brand. Next gen operating models can deliver on smarter learning tools for brand voice adoption, reaching any remote workers too. This supports the broad mix of multilingual live agents, and can expand the multilingual and conversational capabilities of virtual agents.

At TSYS, managed services teams are committed to working with their issuer partner to ensure the human experience is driving all services and customer journeys, ensuring inclusion for a broad digital savvy and digitally challenged customer base. Smart actions like callback assist buttons can help bridge the gap, and human-led engagement campaigns — such as those conducted between Deutsche Bank and TSYS to walk customers through the Deutsche mobile banking app and portal enrolment process for secure customer authentication — are proactively helping customers with lower digital confidence to transition out of the cycle of digital division.

In summary, smarter tech with human touch in the right places and at the right time for the client and customers has become a reality to power next generation customer experiences. With robust services, intelligent campaigns and integrated value-add tools, managed BPO partners can amplify brands to go the extra mile and meet both the digital and diverse evolving customer needs of the future.