Your contact center agents are on the front lines of the customer experience. They’re the staff your customers interact with most, which can make or break the customer relationship.
If your agents can’t help customers get fast and accurate resolutions to their problems, it could cost your bank or financial institution. Poor customer service can hurt your company’s budget and industry reputation.
That’s why it’s important to set your financial services contact center agents up for success. So, how do you help your agents hit the ground running? Below, we go over the cost of poor contact center agent performance and offer key tips to help them provide more effective customer support.
What’s the cost of poor agent performance?
The quality of your customer service, including finance app customer support, directly affects your bank or financial services company’s reputation. Approximately one in 10 dissatisfied customers will tell at least 15 people about a negative experience with a business. That means that if your agents aren’t meeting customer expectations, you could have a potential PR disaster on your hands.
However, the consequences of poor customer service go beyond your brand’s reputation. Worldwide, one in five customers leaves their bank due to poor customer service. This means your bank or fintech company could take hits on multiple fronts. It could see both a higher customer churn rate and increased customer acquisition costs.
Additionally, when you consider that it can cost up to seven times more to acquire new customers than to retain your current customer base, improving customer retention becomes paramount. Helping agents do their jobs better can be a great first step to improving your customer retention rate and creating a better service experience. If you get this right, there is some good news. Customers who have a positive experience with a brand will tell six other people about it, and word of mouth is a powerful tool for acquiring new customers.
How can our financial services contact center improve agent performance?
Prioritizing agent performance is a critical first step for optimizing your financial services contact center. Below are a few steps you can take to reduce agent errors in banking and empower agent success.
Hire the right people
It might sound obvious, but the importance of hiring the right people to power your contact center can’t be overstated. Your agents’ ability to provide quick and helpful responses to customer questions directly impacts the customer experience and key contact center metrics. In fact, 96% of customers say customer service quality is a critical factor in their loyalty to a brand.
That’s why it’s important to hire the right people for the job. Otherwise, your bank or financial services institution could see low employee engagement and high turnover, which directly affects the customer experience.
So, how do you identify the candidates best suited to the role? Here are a few essential qualities to look for when hiring contact center agents:
- Strong interpersonal communication skills
- Emotional resilience
- Solid problem-solving abilities
- Willingness to learn new technology
- The ability to thrive in a hybrid work environment
Create a strong contact center agent onboarding program
So, you’ve conducted interviews and hired the right people. Next, it’s time to focus on creating a strong agent onboarding program. Your onboarding program is a make-or-break moment for employee experience. Employees who have a poor onboarding experience are twice as likely to start looking for a new job.
Businesses face numerous challenges in creating an effective onboarding program. A few examples of common barriers to successful employee onboarding include:
- Outdated training resources
- Lengthy educational courses
- Lack of access to reliable information
- Unclear expectations
How can you create an onboarding program that sets agents up for success and reduces turnover risk? Here are a few best practices to keep in mind as you design the onboarding experience:
- Set clear expectations and goals
- Consider an employee mentorship program
- Ensure training materials are up to date
- Provide clear and actionable feedback
Your onboarding program directly affects the customer experience. Agents who complete a robust onboarding program are more confident, productive and less likely to churn. All of this is critical to creating a positive experience for customers using your financial services.
Leverage artificial intelligence (AI)
Tools such as agent assist AI can be critical for improving financial services contact center agent performance. Real-time agent-assist AI supports agents during live customer interactions, helping them make speedy, accurate diagnoses and provide faster resolutions.
AI can’t replace human agents, but it will help them do their jobs better. Research has shown that contact center agents using generative AI tools saw a 14% increase in productivity, with the greatest gains among newer, less experienced agents.
This real-time coaching can help increase agent productivity, enabling them to handle more service requests in less time. It can also help you improve critical contact center metrics such as first-call resolution rate (FCR) and average handle time (AHT). As a bonus, if your agents can do their jobs more effectively, it can reduce the risk of customer churn.
The bottom line? The future of customer service isn’t humans or AI. It’s humans leveraging AI to provide better customer support.
Implement omnichannel customer support
Traditionally, many businesses have leveraged a multichannel customer support model. While this allows agents and customers to access information through multiple channels, it also has drawbacks. For example, the quality and accuracy of the information can vary widely across channels. This means information is often siloed, leading to fragmented customer experiences.
These inconsistent experiences can negatively impact financial customer trust. It can also increase the risk for potential customer rage. Instead, banks and other financial services institutions looking to get ahead may want to consider omnichannel customer service.
Unlike multichannel customer support, omnichannel customer service involves more than one channel and more than one touchpoint, all integrated within a unified platform. This means that the answers that agents and customers access via in-app customer support are the same ones they can access over the phone or via chat. This ensures agents can provide a consistent customer service experience that helps foster brand trust.
Not only does this help increase issue resolution rates, but it can also help your financial institution reduce the number of repeat callers entering the contact center. This helps you provide more effective digital banking customer support while potentially achieving greater cost savings.
Provide professional development opportunities
The world of finance is changing fast. Providing customer service agent training is critical to help your agents keep up with industry trends and new technology. It also ensures your agents understand the regulatory requirements of the financial services industry.
Also, it can help protect both your institution and customers by teaching agents the basics of cybersecurity and fraud detection. This is paramount for preventing data breaches and safeguarding customer information. Financial organizations experience up to 300 times more cyberattacks than other industries.
Unfortunately, bad actors are always adapting and trying new tactics to steal sensitive information. Providing your agents with ongoing training ensures that they’re up to date on the latest threats affecting the financial services landscape.
Reduce agent errors and set them up for success
Quality customer service plays a critical role in helping businesses retain customers, and the financial services industry is no exception. Currently, banks and other financial institutions risk losing up to a fifth of customers due to poor service experiences.
Prioritizing improvements in agent performance can be a critical first step toward reducing customer churn and improving retention. By following some of the best practices outlined here, your bank or financial institution can begin to reap the benefits of improved contact center agent performance.
Ready to see what’s next? As digital banking adoption accelerates and support demands continue to rise, many institutions are rethinking how they deliver fast, consistent and scalable customer experiences. Download our e-book, The future of digital banking support, to explore the key trends shaping support in 2026 — and how leading financial institutions are adapting to meet growing expectations.
