By Roy Urrico
San Francisco-based Talkdesk exhibited its cloud-native, generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered customer experience (CX) platform at the FinovateFall conference, which took place from Sept. 9-11 in New York City. Talkdesk General Manager Rahul Kumar also sat down with Finopotamus during the conference to discuss how credit unions and banks can ensure a superior CX and define who owns the customer journey.
“We offer a fully omnichannel, artificial intelligence-infused platform that banks and credit unions can leverage to orchestrate connected, cohesive experiences for their customers and members. It is all natively built,” said Kumar.
He explained how Talkdesk differentiates itself in the financial services space. “We invested in technology people who could speak the language, people who understood challenges about banking specifically. We understood the workflows, understood the customer member journey, understood the friction points.”
Talkdesk started identifying those banking issue sets and started solving specific areas of need. That included offering prebuilt workflows, prebuilt integrations, and what Kumar describes as “an ability to orchestrate experiences right out of the box.” Kumar noted that Talkdesk’s prebuilt integrations are designed to connect with Jack Henry, Fiserv, Q2, Alkami, NCR and other popular fintech solutions. “It really helped us deliver a solution that could accelerate time to value for (financial institutions).”
The Member Journey
Kumar believes most credit union members do not have a singular experience; rather, they have a series of experiences strung together that comprise a member journey. Unfortunately, developing a comprehensive view of the member journey at scale is extremely difficult for credit unions to provide.
“(Member) expectations on any channel is (where they) can switch between different channels. But a lot of times because of the way technology investments have been made at credit unions, it becomes impossible for the credit unions to actually deliver on those expectations. There continues to be blind spots in the member journey, which basically lead to a lot of friction,” he explained.
Kumar offered three steps to optimize the member journey:
Become an AI company. Getting the most from AI initiatives requires an AI mindset across the entire organization. This means collaborating on AI strategies and proactively seeking use cases that enhance the member journey and improve operational efficiency.
Canvases, not siloes. That journey must be an enterprise capability. Credit unions should eliminate rigid organizational structures that segment the member journey and create barriers to collaboration. Imagine the member journey as taking place along a broad canvas rather than as a series of separate stops along the way.
A unified platform. Point solutions invariably create a disjointed member journey with plenty of side trips, dead ends, and cul-de-sacs. Having one vendor for calls and another for virtual agents is just asking for trouble.
“If you are not, as an organization, setting the foundations around AI today, there is no way, two years down the line, that the value that AI is going to deliver to you is very different,” said Kumar. “You will still need to start laying the data foundation, investing in platforms, making the organization accountable around the ownership of the member journey.”
Talkdesk Helps MCU Own the Member Journey
“We have seen significant momentum, we have brought multiple community banks and credit unions onto our purpose-built platform pretty much every month in the last year and a half to two years,” Kumar told Finopotamus. “The reason credit unions particularly started partnering with Talkdesk is we were able to give them a single platform around which they could build their entire member experience strategy, so they could get rid of point solutions for various things, declutter the technology stack and take up a one platform approach.”
An example is the $4.4 billion New York City based Municipal Credit Union (MCU), which serves anyone who lives, works, or worships in the five boroughs of New York City – almost 617,000 members at 15 branch locations.
For starters, MCU agents did not have a complete snapshot of members and could not find answers to member questions quickly. Managers spent up to 75% of their time answering agent questions. Without AI integrations, MCU could not handle call volume and resorted to outsourcing some calls to a third-party call center. The credit union took a two-step approach to update the member experience: Restructure and rebuild the contact center; and acquire better technology to support and maintain their new system.
“They wanted to revamp their member experience strategy,” recalled Kumar. “They made it very clear to us, very early into the conversation, they were looking for true partners to help hold their hands.”
MCU signed with Talkdesk in July 2023 an were up and running by November 2023. “In that period of time, we delivered a full modern cloud platform to them with a Jack Henry integration,” noted Kumar. AI built into Talkdesk Autopilot, a generative AI-powered virtual agent; and Talkdesk Copilot, a personalized AI-powered virtual assistant, greatly improved the agent experience and helps agents find the best answers to quickly serve members better.
Talkdesk can handle any member interaction across any channel including voice, SMS, and email. “Any channel that you want your members to be able to engage with you,” explained Kumar. “We can offer those channels as engagement channels and bring all those conversations to a bot that can handle it in a self-service fashion, if it is necessary. We can seamlessly escalate that to an agent. We see ourselves as truly a member engagement platform that can drive the sort of member experiences credit unions want to offer.”
Kumar added, “Our native voice biometrics capabilities through some AI products like Copilot offer real-time guidance and knowledgebase pop ups to agents while they are having conversations.” For members, “(MCU) uses Talkdesk conversational bots to drive the member experience online.” Empowering customers with Talkdesk technology led to a 64% self-service rate for MCU.
“We firmly believe we are part of the credit union movement, and we are partnering with some of the largest credit unions,” Kumar said. He mentioned Apple Federal Credit Union (Fairfax, Va.), EECU (Fort Worth, Texas) Texas Trust (San Antonio) and University Federal (Austin, Texas), and Rize Credit Union (Irwindale, Calif.)
Talkdesk Survey
During FinovateFall 2024, Talkdesk also released the Future of Finance: AI Consumer Trends Survey that was conducted in August 2024 on the online platform Pollfish. It polled 1,500 American consumers ages 18-plus on various questions regarding their interactions with their financial services providers and their experience using AI chatbots.
Some key findings:
Sixty-one percent of respondents interact with a financial services chatbot monthly, this number varies significantly by age, ranging from 71% of millennials to just 43% of baby boomers; Americans are almost twice as likely to trust advice from a human (44%) than an AI chatbot (26%).
Twenty-six percent of Americans avoid asking for financial advice because they are insecure about their financial situation. AI could help, as 40% of respondents say they would have received guidance from a chatbot instead of a human representative.
More than half of the respondents (52%) prefer interacting with human representatives, a sentiment that grows stronger with age. This preference rises to 68% among baby boomers.
Kumar commented: “Our survey reveals a financial services landscape evolving at different speeds and different needs across different generations. While we’re seeing increasing AI adoption, with nearly half of consumers viewing AI chatbots positively, it’s clear that a one-size-fits-all approach does not suffice. Financial services institutions must strike a delicate balance when incorporating AI into their customer experience.”