CUSTOMER PROFILE
01 THE BEFORE
Surveys with little substance
For years, Fifth Third Bank relied primarily on customer surveys to gauge customer sentiment about contact center interactions. The survey results gave managers and supervisors little visibility into agent contributions to customer experience. Calls sampled from survey responses only highlighted a limited range of coachable topics. Unless a caller escalated a complaint there was no way to identify a call in need of supervisory review.
The bank had experimented with automated interaction analytics but for years used NICE Nexidia Analytics on just a small fraction of the overall agent pool. Outside of this small group, supervisors could only coach their agents on metrics, not behavior.
02 THE DESIRE TO CHANGE
Aiming for best-in-class experience
Fifth Third Bank places a high priority on rising to the top of independent third-party customer experience rankings while also improving internal satisfaction KPIs. This makes investments in customer-facing technologies that support these goals high priority. The bank also wanted to gain improved understanding of customer intent, both in the moment and over time.
As actionable insights surfaced from the small consumer banking agent pool on Nexidia Analytics, interest grew in taking the program to full scale. An internal team of contact center and data science specialists created a business case to expand the Nexidia footprint. The incumbent customer survey situation was found lacking on a number of dimensions. Not only did it provide only a small sample size of purely subjective responses, but respondents were clumped in a narrow demographic. This left a wide swath of Fifth Third Bank’s customer pool under-represented.
03 THE SOLUTION
Customer sentiment in the organization-wide spotlight
In 2021, Fifth Third Bank took Nexidia Analytics live to thousands of agents representing a much broader range of the bank’s activities. The new rollout covers the full consumer banking team and expands to dispute resolution, collections, commercial clients, and retail direct sales as well.
Deploying the full-scale program included training resources to help employees understand the scope and importance of the new speech metrics, along with roundtable discussions to ease adoption. With all of the major business units bought in, customer sentiment became the bank’s leading customer experience metric in late 2021. Sentiment is used in all soft skill and customer experience coaching conversations.
After a six-month ramp-up, Fifth Third Bank was able to retire the previous survey program, confident in the superior objective understanding of speech analytics provided by Nexidia Analytics to provide both the substance and the sentiment of a much wider range of interactions.
04 THE RESULTS
Customer experience up, costs down
In the months following the changeover to customer sentiment, Fifth Third Bank realized a variety of cost savings associated with the end of the conventional survey program, improved employee productivity, and higher employee compliance. Process optimizations which began at the speech analytics level, such as a revised self-service workflow for invalid password attempts, have helped Fifth Third Bank repurpose several FTEs from rote password-reset tasks.
Caller sentiment is also used to identify root causes of short-term call volume trends through word cloud and speech analytics categories. These processes in the past would have required manual call audio or transcript reviews and were frequently backward-looking.
Fifth Third Bank now realizes insight from every single call. Deeper dives with NICE Enlighten AI give coaches more topics and more targeted populations for ongoing agent behavioral training that leads to improved customer experience. For example, the expanded solution identified these top agent behavioral contributors to positive customer sentiment:
- Taking ownership of the customer’s issue
- Active listening
- Effective questioning
- Building rapport
- Acknowledgment of customer loyalty
- Promotion of self-service options
Agents now receive targeted training on these significant behavioral factors, and can be rated and compared with peer performance in those areas.
05 THE FUTURE
Greater focus on compliance and cultural buy-in
Fifth Third Bank plans to expand the use of speech analytics to support compliance and risk management goals. “With Nexidia Analytics we can share with our regulators that we’re going the extra mile when it comes to ensuring we’re following their guidelines and regulations,” said Kevin Anderson, Fifth Third Bank speech analytics program manager.
With a full year of institution-wide insights into agent performance on behavioral metrics, leadership also sees the importance of boosting efforts to fully commit to the behaviors that consistently elevate caller sentiment. “We have found that the teams that inundate sentiment into their culture perform better, so we’ll provide training and resources with teams, earlier rather than later, to set them up for success,” Anderson said.
