Tackling Intellectual Waste in Financial Services with AI

More than a decade on from the global financial crisis, many financial services (FS) firms still struggle with profitability and high cost-income ratios. Fortunately, many banks, FS firms and insurance providers have rightfully identified their support and service functions as key to unlocking new revenue opportunities and cost savings.

Providing innovative, varied new services to customers – more quickly and efficiently – is vital to competitive differentiation and acquisition. But service agents only have so much ‘cognitive load’ they can use to support these initiatives.

The best way to improve productivity and profitability is to reduce the number of manual, repetitive tasks and intellectual waste agents must deal with. Automation has been used to great effect in improving response times and freeing capacity through automated responses. Yet its true potential remains untapped. A new approach is needed to drive worthwhile automation at the greatest source of inefficiency - email.

Email: the font of intellectual waste

A service agent’s work is based on communications. Across high-volume, high-complexity lines like trade operations and insurance claims, agents in FS spend much of their time in email. While focused on communicating with customers, the tasks are often transactional in nature. They’re constantly exchanging information between parties or following up for a timely response. This is essential work, but what often isn’t realised is just how inefficient it is.

On taking action to improve process efficiency, specialist insurer Hiscox discovered that 97% of emails sent by clients were routed to the wrong person on its servicing team. Indeed, simple tasks like email triage and requesting more information take up an unsustainable amount of agents’ time. This leaves little capacity for more important work, like delivering new value-adding services to customers. 

Manual email processing is generally low-skilled and repetitive. It represents true intellectual waste for skilled agents, increasing latency, handling times and costs. However, standard automation has struggled to make an impact here.

Email communication depends on the processing of conversational, natural language. Humans do this innately, but it has been very difficult to teach machines how to replicate this skill. Most automation tools require structured, machine-readable data to produce accurate decisions and useful outcomes. Until that data becomes available, agents will continue to spend much of their day trapped in Outlook.

Communications Mining: enabling service automation

Email is an unavoidable cost of doing business. However, FS providers can greatly reduce that cost and give precious time back to their service teams through Communications Mining.

Communications Mining is an emerging class of enterprise software that extracts value from unstructured conversational data - including emails. It uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand masses of business conversations at scale, and converts them into structured data that can then be used for insight and automation.

The application of NLP to communications has seen mixed results in previous years. But recent advancements in model accuracy and training have made NLP-based solutions safer, more reliable and valuable than ever. New models now routinely outperform humans in language understanding and reading comprehension. NLP deployment is now a safe, impactful and cost-effective option.

Communications Mining gives service teams unprecedented, real-time insight into their email-based processes. Furthermore, it enables straight-through processing in workflows that were once impossible to automate. With minimal training, today’s machine learning models can rapidly learn when key information is missing from an email, or understand when the wrong recipient has been chosen.

Automated workflows can easily be set up to resolve service issues. This is taking manual, repetitive work out of agents’ hands and frees them to focus on their most complex and valuable tasks.

Empowering service as a value driver

Communications Mining is a critical stepping stone, scaling automation into once opaque unstructured comms channels. However, its benefits aren’t limited to automation. Communications Mining also gives service agents a 360° overview over inbound communications. Teams can analyse what the most common drivers of work are, and which requests take the longest time to process.

With Communications Mining insights, FS providers can plan, resource and automate much more effectively. Doing so will enhance productivity in one of the most time-constrained parts of the business. Providing the capacity needed to offer the latest, value-adding services to delight, win and retain clients.