The Death of Customer Service

Today our industry is driving towards a world where people can submit their own payments anytime, anywhere—and they can hopefully drive a straight-through-processing payment resulting in no required effort by any financial institution (FI) personnel. Along with this trend, FIs are adding more logic, warnings and walls to customer service channels—particularly IVRs . The result is strong customer discouragement —don’t bother us, do it yourself. Unfortunately, FIs lose an opportunity to interact and build relationships with their customers. They lose the ability to talk to customers about money moving out of their accounts—stripping away opportunities to identify cases where a customer might be in trouble or might benefit from education (either generally or specific to a bank’s products or services). In this session, The Dead Bankers Society will host a live debate around whether the trend towards self-service in payments will result in the death of customer service.