Financial institutions investing in automation for contact centers can boost their productivity most by starting with humans rather than the technology.

While interactive voice response (IVR), click-to-call and voice authentication have eliminated interim verification steps and reduced lead time, such tools are secondary to the fundamental restructuring taking place in the contact centers at leading banks, according to Frederico Berruti, group leader for McKinsey’s financial services practices and global automation at scale.

“The first element that often moves the needle most on productivity of a call center is to look at the agents themselves, and think about how to coach and improve some of the behaviors, scripting, education and access to data the agent has,” Berruti told Bank Innovation. “That’s actually where some of the more valuable technology deployments have occurred to improve some of the systems and interfaces the agents are using — things like robotic desktop automation to pull data more quickly — and come up with better decisioning the agents can use.”

Once the paradigm shifts on performance management, financial institutions can change the environment to be more proactive, versus firefighting issues as they arise. “That’s where you look at technologies, like IVR, that help address client needs faster — before they even need to go through an agent,” Berruti said.

As the footprints for bank branches shrink in the United States, the contact center model will begin to morph into a conduit for the omnichannel experience, said Mikos Dietz, who leads McKinsey’s strategy and corporate finance group within the global financial services practice.

“The future goal of the contact center is shifting,” Dietz said. “The future is really an omnichannel model when the contact center is not a separate channel, but integrated into the customer experience as a touchpoint.”

U.S. bank contact centers won’t be the high-attrition, “follow-the-script,” work environments typically seen today, Dietz said. Rather, contact center roles will attract senior-level subject matter experts, and more sophisticated intelligent routing will connect the right agents to the right person at the right time with the right data. The centers will become a source of more specialized knowledge, whereas branches become a more generalist touchpoint, he added.