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Bank of America is increasingly engaging with consumers and small businesses through a blend of digital services, its virtual assistant Erica, and traditional branch interactions. Despite the growing reliance on digital channels, BofA continues to view in-person banking as a vital component of its overall customer experience.
Central to integrating these diverse channels and ensuring a cohesive customer journey is the bank’s customer care function. This department adopts a holistic approach to customer satisfaction and service delivery, spearheaded by “Voices,” BofA’s pervasive customer experience evaluation system.
Understanding BofA’s ‘Voices’ Platform
- Launched in 2018, the “Voices” platform dispatches millions of email surveys annually to gauge how effectively BofA bankers, Erica, and digital services are meeting customer expectations. This system actively engages hundreds of thousands of customers daily.
- Voices provides performance feedback that is rapidly accessible at every organizational level, from high-level management overviews down to individual customer-facing employees.
- The system is designed to capture both positive reinforcement and constructive criticism, offering bankers, supervisors, and managers valuable insights into successful interactions and areas ripe for improvement.
BofA emphasizes a wide-angle perspective on customer interactions, particularly those involving Erica, which often span multiple touchpoints. “Simply deploying new capabilities in isolation doesn’t create the integrated experience we aim for,” explains Ashley Ross, BofA’s head of consumer client experience and governance, who oversees Voices. She highlights the bank’s focus on understanding the entire client journey, “in terms of what the client is trying to accomplish end to end.”
Ross elaborates, “Erica may connect clients with a live chat, a phone call with one of our bankers, or even schedule an in-person appointment at a financial center.”
How BofA’s ‘Voices’ System Drives Improvement
Built on a platform from Medallia, BofA’s Voices system employs a consistent 1-10 rating scale for all customer interactions, ensuring comparability. This includes assessing satisfaction with recent transactions and the customer’s likelihood to recommend the bank. Beyond numerical ratings, customers are encouraged to provide detailed verbal comments.
Both ratings and comments undergo rigorous analysis, transforming “hundreds of millions of datapoints” into clear, visually intuitive findings, as Ross points out.
Disseminating Feedback Throughout the Organization
A core advantage of the Voices platform is its ability to disseminate critical feedback and improvement opportunities throughout the organization, beyond the dedicated CX team. “The true culture change occurs when these visuals reach every teammate,” Ross states. “The people who interact with clients daily also have access to these dashboards, which permeates the culture throughout the organization.”
Voices is complemented by a related initiative called “Follow Ups.” Ross explains, “If a client provides feedback indicating a need for follow-up, we absolutely ensure that need is met.”
The bank values positive feedback just as much as areas for improvement. Ross notes that positive comments are highly motivational for staff, giving them “that spring in their step, and validation with their clients” when they learn their efforts made a real difference.
Enhancing Digital Banking Experiences
The evaluation criteria for digital interactions differ from those for live bankers, focusing on functional aspects rather than interpersonal qualities. “On the digital side, ratings often revolve around factors like speed, usability, security, and ease of finding information,” Ross explains. The system also tracks the adoption rates of new digital features.
Voices can precisely pinpoint specific customer service issues, even down to individual web page performance, demonstrating BofA’s preference for detailed specifics over broad generalities.
The Payoff: Ross emphasizes that every piece of feedback, regardless of the rating, offers valuable insights. Dissatisfied customers, labeled “detractors” by the bank, provide unvarnished perspectives that are carefully considered. Similarly, “neutrals”—those with mixed feelings—offer crucial signals on where the bank must improve to convert them into enthusiastic advocates.
Customer Feedback Fuels Innovation
Beyond identifying areas for improvement, the feedback mechanism actively solicits suggestions and requests for new features or services. These insights serve as vital signals that drive BofA’s innovation pipeline.
Case Study: Enhancing Zelle Functionality
Customers expressed their appreciation for Zelle’s real-time payment capabilities but identified a missing feature: the ability to set up recurring payments. This suggestion resonated deeply, even personally for Ross, who frequently sends funds to her college-aged daughter via Zelle. The subsequent implementation of recurring Zelle payments directly addressed this customer need, simplifying regular transfers and preventing forgotten payments.
BofA’s Strategic View on AI in Consumer Banking
As a leader in customer-facing AI applications, BofA holds a nuanced perspective on the technology’s role. “While there’s significant industry buzz around AI, companies that excel use it deliberately to meet specific client needs, as we have with Erica,” Ross acknowledges.
She further elaborates, “Here, we often say that AI is not a strategy. AI is one of the tools that we use to enable our strategy.”
Meeting the Demand for 360-Degree Personalization
A core element of BofA’s customer care strategy is to support increasing personalization across all customer touchpoints. Ross notes strong feedback from customers expressing a desire to be treated “as a person, not a number. ‘Tell me what’s important to me, not what’s important to my neighbor’.”
Personalization has evolved from a differentiator to a fundamental expectation. “We’ve always known that personalization delights our clients, but it’s increasingly becoming their expectation,” Ross affirms.
Achieving this involves robust integration of customer data, enabling call center associates, through tools like “Erica Assist,” to instantly access a customer’s past interactions across all channels. Associates also receive insights based on customer behavior and stated goals within the bank’s Life Plan tool, available online and via the mobile app. This enhanced version of Erica for internal staff is continually expanding, alongside the ongoing development of the customer-facing Erica virtual assistant.
Source: https://thefinancialbrand.com/news/customer-experience-banking/bank-of-america-voice-customer-erica-194746