HITT- Exploring customer experience trends in finance and healthcare- Oct 29, 2024

In today’s training, Meagan Thai, director of CC and UC at Telarus, delves into customer experience (CX) trends, particularly in the finance and healthcare sectors. She emphasizes the importance of hyper personalization, utilizing data for better customer connections, and the growing role of AI in enhancing both customer and agent engagement. Key challenges such as authentication and fraud prevention in finance, along with appointment scheduling in healthcare, are discussed, highlighting the need for seamless integration with existing systems. Meagan also points out the increasing demand for transcription and summarization of interactions, as well as the potential for passwordless logins in the future. Overall, her insights provide valuable guidance for navigating the evolving landscape of customer experience.

Introduction to CX Trends

Let’s begin the Telarus Tuesday call with today’s high intensity tech training all about CX customer experience and the key trends from which and the industries within which you can quickly benefit.

Meagan Thai is Telarus director of CC and UC, and joins us now with today’s training. Hey. Welcome back, Meagan. It’s been a while.

Thank you, Doug. I know. I was just thinking that I thought it’s been a few months since I’ve been on one of these Tuesday calls, so I’m excited to be here to talk about some more CX trends and what we’re seeing as use cases in specific industries, in finance and and health care. So I’m super excited to to let our partners and everybody know what I’m hearing in the industry.

Glad you’re here. It’s all yours.

Alright. Thank you.

Well, you know, my other role is solution architect. So I am here to to help trusted advisers all day every day do discovery, help you with your customer opportunities, help them figure out what’s going on, where where the challenges are, and what we what we can do to get them from point a to point b, on on a solution. So today, I will be talking about the CX industry in general, which we can talk about a few trends that I’m seeing, and then we’re gonna move into putting all that into context by talking about the use cases that I’m personally hearing when I’m speaking with your customers, specifically in the health care and the finance industry. Alright? So, Chandler, let’s go to the next slide where we’re gonna talk about some of the trends that I’ve been seeing so far.

The Rise of Hyper-Personalization

The first one, now if you’ve been on these Tuesday calls or you’ve been to some of our CX ascends, you’ve probably heard Sam Nelson, our VP of our CX practice, talk about hyper personalization.

It’s a mouthful to say.

It’s really the way for these brands to better connect with customers like you and I. And so they do this. You know, in the old days, they would just do this based on your name and maybe where you live, your location.

Now they’re taking a bunch of data to figure this out, and they’ll do things like, look at your browsing history. What is your your purchasing history look like? So that they can predict what your next step will be. What are you gonna buy next, right, and be able to connect with you at that level. So some examples would be, Netflix. Oh my gosh.

I love Netflix.

I’m on this kick where I’ve been watching these true crime documentaries for the last year. It’s totally morbid. I can’t seem to get away from it. Julie’s nodding her head because I think females love these things.

I don’t know. But I watch a lot of it, so Netflix knows this. So based on my watching history, it’ll say, hey, Meagan. We noticed you like these ones because you gave us a thumbs up.

We noticed other users like you, similar in profile. They watched this new documentary, and they liked it too. We think you’re gonna like it. Give it a shot.

Right? They give me every time. So that’s one one example. Also, Amazon. I’m a huge Amazon shopper, Amazon Prime.

And so last week, I bought let’s see. For my other half, he got a new boat for fishing, and I bought him this fishing pole holder attachment to go with it. As soon as I clicked on order confirmation, Amazon says, hey. By the way, Meagan, did you know that this vendor you’re buying from, they also have cup holders that you can attach to your post.

Do you wanna buy? It gets me every time. Right? But do you see what they’re doing is they’re connecting with me and making me feel like I’m not just a customer with an account ID.

I’m I’m a valued customer of theirs. So they do it quite a bit to, give me a better experience and, of course, retain me as a loyal customer.

AI-Driven Engagement in Customer Experience

Second thing here is AI driven engagement.

We’ve been talking about AI all year long. Last year, I’m seeing here some of our attendees are using AI assistants to record and take notes for them. So it makes sense that one of the trends we’re seeing is AI driven engagements. So how does that work? We’re seeing the engagements come to light with not just the end customers, but also the employees or the agents. Right? In in our CX world, we call them agents.

So it happens from both ends, and it’s a way to drive more efficient interactions, saves time for everybody. So from a user perspective, it could be something like a chatbot on the front end. Maybe I don’t wanna talk to a live person right now, but I wanna find out where’s my order. Can you give me a tracking number?

That should be easy for the system to figure out, right, and send that number to me so it saves me time and I can track my order. Now the key thing with that, though, you always have to have the ability to escalate to a live person. Because what happens if I get frustrated as a customer? It’s not solving my problems.

It doesn’t understand what I’m asking it. You always have to escalate to a live person.

So from the agent perspective, the way we’re seeing AI being used in engagements is, and I’m telling you, this is a huge ask these days. It’s in in high demand.

They want transcription. Our customers are saying, can we get transcription of our interactions?

And by the way, if I’ve got an agent who’s handling a a call for fifteen minutes, can you auto summarize that for me?

Give me this fifteen minute conversation, summarize it into one paragraph that’s gonna tell me what they discussed, what the problem was, if it was resolved, if there are next steps, and it can do this. It can summarize everything into a little paragraph. So now as an agent, it saves me five minutes from having to take notes and entering all that into my my CRM and saving it. It does all of that for me. So you can see where it’s really driving efficiency there, and it saves a lot of time from both the consumer and the agent side of things. The third the third thing on here is seamless digital experiences.

Creating Seamless Digital Experiences

It’s a fancy way of saying, how do we make this experience much easier for our our clients?

You know, for years, we’ve been talking about omnichannel, how important that experience has been. Right? Giving your customers different means, different channels to communicate with you as a brand. This, specifically, what we’re seeing is how do we make a better experience from the digital side of things? So think of web chat communications or social media, which is huge, or, you know, chat bots and and mobile apps, things like that. Those are all digital experiences. So I’ll give you some example.

I love Instacart. I really I I love buying from Costco, but I really hate going out there and parking and waiting in line. And I do a lot of, food ordering. I’m making myself sound like a couch potato.

I know. But I love to use the food apps. Right? Like Uber Eats, DoorDash, things like that.

What I love is I’ll go through the mobile app. I’ll place my order for the food I want. I instantly will either get an email or a text or maybe a combination of both that says, thanks for your order. Hey.

We have an ETA of six PM, so expect your order by six PM today. And then within fifteen, twenty minutes, I get another text that says, hey, Meagan. We’ve finished cooking your meal. Get ready to enjoy it.

And by the way, your driver, and they know his name, Bob, is here to pick up your order, so it’s en route. So be be be on the lookout for it. And next thing you know, I get another text that says, congrats. I know your order’s been been delivered.

How do we know? Here’s a picture of it sitting on your porch. Right? So it tells me every step of the way.

It follows me in my journey with them, and it gives me just a really good experience. And maybe it’s just me, but I I do like that real time communications, and that’s what it’s doing for me. So we’re seeing these three things really, be in high demand, especially in the last year when it comes to how do we improve customer experience in general. So these are the three things that we see quite a bit.

Contextualizing Trends in Finance and Healthcare

So let’s try to put that into context, right, in the in the next couple of slides. And, again, I’m gonna focus on health care and finance. Let’s see how these things come into play.

So when I say finance, I’m not talking necessarily about the big banks. I’m talking more about the credit unions. I’ve got a credit union being built on every corner, of the street here where I live.

So I feel like, I swear, I feel like at least fifty percent of opportunities that I’m helping our partners work, but, you know, it has to do with the credit union.

And while a lot of their ask are similar, they’re all different. Okay? So in the credit union space, their biggest concern really is how do I authenticate my members? How do I verify that my members are really who they say they are?

Because, of course, we all know fraud is a huge issue these days. So they’re trying to to help, prevent that. So today, oftentimes, they’re using their live personnel to authenticate a member. Well, even if each call may take, you know, less than a minute to authenticate someone, those minutes add up.

Right? So they want a way to to automate that. So they ask us, is there a way for us to do voice biometrics to authenticate a member? Or maybe, you know, going through a virtual assistant of some sort, they can answer one or two questions, and then they get pushed to text that gives them a code to enter into their mobile app to to do two factor authentication.

We get asked this quite a bit.

The next thing is, and I talked a little bit about this previously, right, was using some sort of a chatbot or a conversational AI For those questions, that should be easily answered. You know, for me as a as a bank member, I don’t necessarily wanna talk to someone. I wanna do this quickly. So it could be if I’m not using the mobile app, which we’ll talk about in a second here, if I’m not doing that, maybe I wanna call in to check on my balance.

Maybe I wanna make a payment towards my credit card with them, but I don’t necessarily wanna talk to a live person. So you wanna you want to, allow your members to have access to these different channels. In a way again, it’s a way to automate and self-service. We get asked that all the time.

How do I automate to save on time? How do I self-service?

Mobile banking app. Oh my gosh. I love mine. I love mine. I’m in there. I deposit checks that way.

Right? I I think I go to the bank maybe once a year if that, maybe twice. I don’t know. But everything’s done through my my mobile banking app.

So I hear oftentimes from these credit unions is, hey. Our demographics is such that they all love voice calls. We we get that. They’re afraid to do, you know, anything like a chatbot.

So but we are still trying to drive people to use our mobile app. I hear that a lot.

On my mobile app, it’s very rare, but in those cases where I need to chat with someone live, I have that ability to. But what does that mean? That means on the other end, you’re gonna have to be able to integrate into some some system that allows you to chat live with one of their, their employees. So this has been a ask. I see that come up quite a bit, and I’m I’m happy to hear it because I I think mobile apps are the way to go.

And and finally, integration.

It doesn’t matter what vertical you’re in. You have to talk about integration. We we say this quite a bit because it’s so critical. You know, our customers have existing applications that they’re using.

In the banking industry, it’s called core banking system.

You’ll hear names like Fiserv, Jack Henry, Finastra. All these names will come up. It’s their core banking system, which is where they house all of their account information, where all the transactions happen. Right?

Deposits, withdrawals, all that good stuff. So it is critical to their business. And so oftentimes, they want to integrate. What I do hear a lot from these customers is, you know what?

It’s a great core banking system, but it is really hard to integrate with. They are not open when it comes to their APIs and technology.

So it’s imperative for us to make sure that we look at vendors that say, hey. We’ve done this before. We have experience with Fiserv and Jack Henry and so on. Or we may not have out of the box integrations, but we know there’s ways to do this.

So we have to have that conversation with them and really understand what does that integration mean. Okay? So these are the things that I’m seeing pop up when it comes to banking or credit unions. Let’s take a look now at health care, and you might see some correlation there, but I they’re a little bit different.

Innovations in Healthcare Clinics

So when I say health care, I’m not talking about big hospitals. We get get that once in a while, but what I’m talking about is clinics. I hear all the time, hey. We’re a health care clinic.

We do a lot of m and a. We’re acquiring lots of clinics. We’re absorbing them. Everyone’s on disparate systems. We need to standardize and have something easy to manage. And by the way, from a, you know, a a patient perspective, here are some of the things that we would love to have to make things a bit more, enjoyable in the experience. Because let’s face it, when we we’re dealing with health, it’s very stressful.

So you hear this all the time. You see this, appointment scheduling and reminders. It’s huge.

I wish there was a way for me and my provider that I could automatically schedule, maybe log in to my my app and schedule, but I can’t. I have to call in.

And so when they remind me I’ve got some health care providers who are really good about text me a reminder of my appointment, which I love, and I click on it and I confirm. But I’ve got others who are calling me to remind me. And if I can’t pick it up, I’m on calls all day, and now they’re leaving a message and we’re playing phone tags. So it just seems very inefficient.

Because, you know, in in health care with clinics, if you’re a no show, that’s gonna cost them revenue. Right? So it’s important for them to remind you, and you confirm, and you show up to your appointments.

Now what they want what I’m hearing is they wanna take that a step beyond with proactive outreaching. So and I’m not talking about just human health care. This can apply to to animal health care. Right?

I talk a lot with, veterinarian clinics that say, hey. We wanna be proactive in our outreach. Employment reminders is one thing, but you know where we lose money is when our pay our patients don’t come back. So we want to remind them months in advance.

I love this when my vet reminds me because I’m thinking, Louie, I think his annual is coming up. It’s usually in the fall. I don’t remember when or what shots are are due. So I love it when they text me and they say, Meagan, here’s your reminder.

Louie’s due for his, his annual exam, you know, in two months. Give us a call, schedule an appointment, whatever we have to do. But by the way, he’s due for his lipo vaccine or whatever it is and and a wellness exam. So I love them when they do that.

So this is really a way to reach out and bring back those patients that they haven’t heard from in a while.

So I hear a lot more about that. They wanna be more proactive than just sending out reminders for an upcoming appointment.

This next thing, this thing is very personal to me because I went through this with my mom when when her health wasn’t well. In home health care.

And what’s cool is I’m starting to hear more and more about this. So not just clinics, but, hey, we’re organizations, and not just mental or behavioral health. We get a lot of that too. But we are providing in home health care, maybe hospice as well, physical therapy in the home for senior citizens.

And we need to have a way to communicate between our employees and the caregivers and the nurses in the field. It’s important. And, of course, these care caregivers and nurses also need to have be able to call, the doctors, in real time. So we are seeing this ask, and and we’re being asked, hey.

How do we bring in a system that’s gonna bring everyone together so that we can track everyone’s activity and make it so communications is quick, right, in real time? We need that. So I love that. I I I can help them find a solution.

Integration Needs in Healthcare Systems

And, of course, integration.

Big piece here. In the health care care industry, you’re talking about, health re medical records, electronic medical records such as Epic, Cerner. These are big names. I love my Epic, MyChart.

But you’re gonna hear about this and how do you integrate. So we do have some vendors, unfortunately, that can has a middleware, called SpinScide that could integrate with these health care systems seamlessly. So make sure we’re aware of that. These are questions I’m gonna ask on discovery calls to uncover what is needed, what is that integration going to look like.

Okay? So these are some of the use cases between the finance space, the health care industry. Hopefully, you can tie it back into all the trends that I talked about as well.

Exploring AI in Current Platforms

So I talk about all these platforms and how we’re gonna find it. Chandler, on on the next, on the next slide, let’s show them this is our landscape. And I don’t even think this is all of them, honestly. I think we’ve got hundreds.

But these are the ones that we’ve been having success with. Now you’ll notice in the upper right hand corner, that purple box of AI, I think about a year, year and a half ago, we only had three in there. Look at how much it’s grown because there’s such a huge need for AI. Right?

It’s all the buzz these days. And a lot of our customer are asking for you know, if they already have existing platforms, how do we add to it and make it even better? And sometimes AI will come into play or CPaaS will come into play for messaging platforms. We we hear a lot of that these days.

So this is a lot of information.

Introducing the Solution Engineering Team

It’s hard to navigate through. It’s even harder for your customers to understand which route they go, and so that’s where we come into play. This is where we can help you, and we encourage you to come to us, to our teams. What does our team look like? On the next slide here, Chandler, it is the entire SE team, managed by Joshua Presta, who is amazing. If you’ve never had to work with him, he’s just one of the most amazing human beings ever on the on the planet.

So we’ve got a team here of solution engineers.

I’m one of the solution architects that are down below where we really focus, highly on certain certain aspects of our of our practice, whereas our, solution engineers, they’re like the big brains around everything. Right? So come to any one of us. If you start with one of our solution engineers and it’s highly specialized like CX, they’ll bring myself in.

They’ll bring my counterpart, Mikey b, in. He he manages the the East Coast. I’m on the west. We both meet in the middle.

And then we bring in JLo, who’s a big brain around AI and really, really complex, contact center opportunities. So we all work together as a team. We’re here to support you. So reach out to any one of us, and we are more than happy to help you through this, and help your customers navigate through what what makes the most sense for them.

Next Steps for Collaboration

So what happens next?

It’s really kinda simple. Right? We lean on you, our advisers, to have those relationships with your customers or new customers and figure out, you know what? I think there’s something here that has to do with business communications.

I think they’ve got some challenges. We can help them solve some of their business issues.

I think it’s a lead. You know? So you get to that point where you can uncover some of the the needs that they have. You don’t have to go into details.

Bring it to us. Let’s talk about it. So what I love is if you and I can prep first for the call. I don’t like to go on blind.

You and I will talk a little bit about it. I’ll do some research on the customer, what that opportunity looks like, what their business model looks like, and then let’s get on the call with your customer. We’ll do a discover discovery where I ask a lot of questions, but we’ll uncover a bunch of stuff. And that’s where we can figure out, well, which direction do we wanna go?

What suppliers do we need to to register with? And we register early.

And we’ll let the suppliers do a lot of the heavy lifting.

But I’m with you every step of the way. If it’s a complex deal, I’m gonna stay in there with you. We’ll do discovery, to demos, to negotiations together as needed.

And then at the end, hopefully, we can all we can all close it together. I made it sound simple. Right? Lean on us, and we can help make it a lot easier for you. Thank you. That’s all I had today.

Advisors’ Questions on Supplier Integration

Meagan, you do make it sound simple, and we appreciate that. I know the partners do as well. Just a couple of quick questions that, our advisers have been asking in the chat. Several are asking about some specific situations in which they’re looking for a supplier that can integrate with a specific system or do one or more specific things. Rather than go into those details, would you just reiterate again what are the types of things that an adviser should bring to that conversation with you to make sure that we can direct them to suppliers or solutions that would best fit?

Yeah. I think at a high level, I love it when partners can come to me and say, hey. I’ve got a customer who needs this, this, and this. They they may not need they may not know everything, but give me some some high level information.

And, again, critical, right, the integration pieces. Hey. They’re using x y z CRM right now, and I think there’s been some talk about integration. Sometimes it can be an obscure name we’ve never heard of before.

On our team, we we love to Google things, and we love to find out what does a CRM do and what is it comparable to. Do we have access to it? Do we not? Is it out of the box?

I mean, we’ll do our research. We’ll come back to the partner and say, you know what? This one is one that’s not very well known. It’s not gonna be out of the box integration, so we’re gonna have to have a deeper conversation.

But we have some vendors who can meet the the requirements that you’re you’re talking about, and then we can we can take it from there. Or if there’s not enough information, definitely, let’s have a conversation with the customer so I can uncover a bit more and guide them in the right right path. So I hope that answered the question, Doug, because it’s usually not that black and white. You know, we we have to uncover more to figure out what the best match is.

Future of Authentication in CX

You bet. Thanks, Janine and Alberto, for the question. Earlier in the presentation, Meagan, you talked a little bit about authentication, especially in the financial industry, but we’re seeing it all over.

In your opinion, as as CX continues to evolve, what do you see as the future of authentication, and how can our advisors have a productive conversation with their clients about future authentication needs?

So what’s kinda cool, we have a supplier called TrueYou where they do, passwordless logins and access and whatnot because it’s more secure even. They’ll do things like facial recognition to make sure that you are who you are.

So I think that’s gonna be maybe the future is because, you know, authenticating via passwords and questions and this and that, it becomes very cumbersome and, quite frankly, confusing. I can’t keep up with it it myself personally. So in the future, we we start to evolve in our technology. Maybe it is more than just, you know, it I don’t know.

You’ve seen it on these movies. Right? The the irises. Like, when I go through the airport, I do clear check-in.

I don’t do TSA. They use my my eyes to to verify who I am. I don’t even even need to show my ID. It’s amazing.

So I think we’re gonna go towards that versus, you know, state your Social Security. No. That’s not secure. Right?

Not and what’s your mother’s maiden name and all this stuff. So I think we’ll see more, like, a sci fi or futuristic ways to authenticate versus using a person, you know, their their voice and their their brain knowledge to authenticate. That’s just my opinion.

Amazing advances.

Identifying New Opportunities in CX

Brian also asked a great a great question here as well. We talked a little bit about finance health care today. Where else can partners find new logos to work with in the CX space?

Oh my gosh. All different verticals.

We see a lot with manufacturing, which I’m so happy to when I see manufacturing because I feel like they’re so behind the times. The conversation is very different when you talk about manufacturing. They are not completely ready to go the AI route.

You know, you’re still talking hard phones and, auto attendants and whatnot. But we see a lot of, manufacturing. We see a lot of automotive car dealerships. I’ve got a call, I think, today or tomorrow with a new automotive company.

So we see a lot of that, technology space still still there.

BPOs, business process outsourcing. So whether a customer is a BPO and they want to have technology that’ll help their staff members or it’s customers looking to outsource. So we, you know, we can help them find the butts in seats to fulfill what they need. Restaurants, retail, education, government.

Oh my gosh. We we it’s all different verticals that we’re seeing a little bit of everything. So we have to put on different hats. You know, we we hear a different, an opportunity from a different vertical, and we can be on back to back calls and they’re all different.

You just have to pivot and understand what that that vertical needs and ask the right questions, and that’s what I’m here to help help you with.

Thank you, Meagan. Great information. Great presentation today.