Automation and artificial intelligence technologies can bring huge benefits to administrative functions, streamlining the processing of unstructured data and communications to lower costs and reduce errors – all the while improving customer service.
With structured digital messaging formats now the norm across financial services, automation can streamline the processing of these instructions and lead to efficiencies and service improvements.
But what about unstructured communication?
Client requests such as a change of address can come in many formats. While some companies use online forms, in many cases this kind of information comes through email or other non-standard formats, varying greatly from person to person.
This requires administrative staff to sort through the information, rationalise it, and allocate it to the appropriate team for action. Put in a different way, it opens the door to human errors in data input. It also eats up resources that could be redirected to more valuable tasks within the business.
Bringing structure to unstructured data
Technological advances can vastly improve this way of working. Making use of artificial intelligence (AI) is a cost-effective and efficient way to assess and organise unstructured communications.
Machine learning technology can ‘read’ messages and derive their intent. It identifies the important aspects and ascertains what action is necessary, while always learning and so improving.
These messages can be in the form of emails, letters, texts, voice messages and other channels. They can now be fed into machine learning systems to be analysed quickly using sophisticated ‘natural language processing’ (NLP) models, with remarkably accurate results.
Intelligent automation like this can drastically reduce administration costs by speeding up the indexing and deriving the intent of unstructured communication. This paves the way for further streamlining and efficiencies in other areas of data management.
The ‘learning’ aspect of such technology means that the system requires minimal guidance from human operators. As more data is fed into the system it develops its intelligence meaning. In other words, it gets better at understanding information and acting on it correctly.
Measuring customer satisfaction
Further to providing structure to unstructured communication, AI can also give companies valuable insights into customer satisfaction.
NLP systems can be taught to recognise the sentiment of communications, helping to identify when customers are very happy or dissatisfied with the service they are receiving. While human administrators can do this too, by automating it a computer system can identify patterns among unstructured communications and flag them to be addressed.
For instance, if there is an underlying issue with the speed at which changes of address instructions are being processed, this may become evident through analysing the content of client communications. Using an AI system to monitor and analyse this means management and oversight teams can drill down through huge amounts of customer data to identify the probable cause of spikes in dissatisfaction and move quickly to address the issue.
Automating client communication sentiment recognition not only helps to identify and address issues like this, but also gives greater transparency on operational performance.
Additionally, with regulators increasing their scrutiny of financial services companies in relation to their operational resilience, data audits are becoming more important. The ability to demonstrate a transparent and consistent data management process shows that customer data is being handled both securely and accurately.
Stanza: Machine learning for efficient customer service
Bravura’s Stanza product is an artificial intelligence technology system designed to help companies deliver outstanding customer service by providing structure to unstructured communication accurately and assist with speeding up data processing.
We believe technology such as Stanza can make scaling a business significantly easier. Instead of having to hire more administrative staff as volumes increase, the capacity of the technology to accommodate growth means busier periods do not become more expensive to handle.
Stanza can be used as a standalone administration system or integrated with existing customer management platforms. Either way, it is designed to automate the capture, data extraction, derive the intent and sentiment of any unstructured communication using the latest artificial intelligence technology before passing to appropriate channel for processing. By implementing Stanza administration teams around the world will reduce costs and errors within their operation and deliver an enhanced customer service powered by machine learning.
Speak to us today about how Stanza can help your business.
For more information about Bravura and the fund administration services we offer, please get in touch.
About the author
More Insights
