In today’s financial services sector, customer engagement is undergoing a decisive shift: customer contact volumes are rising, expectations are higher than ever, and the appetite for seamless, omnichannel service continues to grow. Yet institutions remain bound by legacy systems and constrained budgets. The traditional levers of cost reduction, such as offshoring, process optimisation, and channel deflection, have largely been exhausted.
The result? Waiting times are climbing. Customer satisfaction is slipping. Agents are overwhelmed. And C-level leaders are asking, ‘What can we do differently?’
The answer lies in rebalancing priorities. Companies must stop viewing cost, compliance, and customer experience as trade-offs and instead align people, technology, and data around a unified engagement strategy. Based on our extensive work with financial institutions globally, there are several strategic investments that will shape the next generation of customer engagement in banking and finance.
Digital Dexterity is a Prerequisite
Every great transformation starts with people. Yet despite the billions invested in digital transformation, too many institutions neglect the capabilities of the very employees meant to drive it forward. Digital dexterity, the ability for frontline teams to fluidly adopt and leverage digital tools, is essential in a hybrid and remote-first world.
This isn’t about giving agents a laptop and VPN access. It’s about providing a unified, intuitive technology environment that eliminates the chaos of switching between siloed platforms. For example, Microsoft Teams for meetings, Zoom for customer calls, a separate call centre interface, combined with disconnected CRMs, create a cognitive overload that slows resolution and damages the customer experience.
By integrating communication, data, and workflows into one unified platform, banks can significantly enhance productivity and compliance. Platforms equipped with no-code dialogue builders and smart automation enable frontline managers to consistently improve services without relying on IT. As a result, we’ve observed that institutions can reduce call handling times by as much as 30% simply by streamlining the user experience.
AI That Works: Automation Without Alienation
Too often, AI is positioned as a silver bullet. In practice, most financial institutions have already deployed chatbots and self-service tools only to find them more frustrating than functional. This is not a technology problem, it’s an orchestration one.
The goal isn’t to replace humans, but to augment them. High-performing institutions distinguish between automation for efficiency and automation for engagement. Bots, when intelligently deployed, can handle up to 65% of inbound requests, which can range from account balance queries to payment status updates, while seamlessly escalating complex needs to live agents.
The key factor here is context. AI-driven voice and chatbots need access to real-time customer data to provide personalised and relevant support. For example, if a customer requests their last two statements, they shouldn’t have to navigate through three menus or go through re-authentication. Smart conversational AI can handle the task in seconds by recognising the customer, verifying them securely, and completing the task end-to-end.
This level of seamless, proactive automation reduces cost, minimises friction, and, crucially, improves customer satisfaction rather than sacrificing it.
Legacy Platforms Are Costing You More Than You Think
The debate over cloud versus on-premise is over, and financial institutions that are still tied to legacy communication infrastructure are exposing themselves to significant risk while at the same time lagging behind the competition.
Legacy systems are expensive to maintain, difficult to scale, and often incompatible with the data governance and security demands of modern finance. More worryingly, they’re a primary reason many contact centres cannot adapt to evolving customer behaviours such as channel-switching, asynchronous support, and remote resolution.
Modern contact centre platforms, especially those integrated natively into tools like Microsoft Teams, offer more than just functionality, they offer flexibility. With one common environment for voice, chat, email, and social media, every agent becomes part of a larger, orchestrated engagement network. And with cloud-native deployments, contact centres can be spun up or down in days, rather than months. This is critical for resilience in times of crisis or rapid growth.
Customer Data Should Power Every Interaction
Financial services are inherently personal, and every inquiry, whether routine or high stakes, occurs in a context. Yet in too many organisations, agents are forced to hunt across screens and systems for that context, delaying resolutions and frustrating customers.
The future belongs to organisations that place customer data at the core of every dialogue, automatically presenting customer history, preferences, and relevant product details at the moment of contact. This is how self-service becomes smart, agents become trusted advisors, and institutions gain the consistency and personalisation needed to differentiate in a crowded market.
Moreover, with tight customer data integration, switching between channels (from bot to agent, from chat to call) becomes frictionless. The customer never has to repeat themselves, and every touchpoint builds on the last.
Reporting Is Not Enough
Traditional KPIs such as Average Handle Time (AHT), First Contact Resolution (FCR), and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) are useful, but they only tell part of the story. In an omnichannel, distributed world, real-time visibility into all customer dialogues, across departments and channels, is non-negotiable.
This not only optimises the contact centre, but it also surfaces customer insights across the entire enterprise. Why are customers calling more about a certain feature? Why are service requests spiking in one geography? Where is friction accumulating, and how can it be pre-empted?
Advanced dialogue analytics, powered by AI and integrated with BI tools like Power BI, are enabling financial institutions to go beyond tracking performance to improving it. When you can measure the end-to-end customer journey, you can proactively design better outcomes.
Rethinking the Contact Centre as a Strategic Asset
Banks and financial institutions have always led with trust. But in a world of heightened expectations, that trust must continuously be earned, in every interaction.
It’s time to reimagine customer engagement not as a cost centre, but as a strategic differentiator. That means investing in the tools, platforms, and people that can deliver frictionless, contextual, and human-centred experiences at scale.
The road ahead will not be paved with buzzwords or off-the-shelf bots. It will be led by institutions willing to modernise the backbone of their customer operations with one smart investment at a time.
Because in this new era, how you talk to your customers may matter more than anything else you offer.
