How Kustomer Workflows boost efficiency for customer service teams in financial institutions

Financial institutions face uniquely high stakes when delivering customer service challenges. Financial institutions must navigate a constant influx of sensitive and often complex inquiries while ensuring strict compliance with regulations, such as anti-money laundering (AML) and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in the United States. Customer experience teams must juggle precision and regulatory pressure. At the same time, customers across all geographies expect both fast resolutions and airtight security. This combination of complexity, compliance, and customer demand raises the bar for modern customer support systems.

The Nutanix Financial Services Enterprise Cloud Index survey found that 96% of respondents reported that generative AI is affecting their data security concerns. But, financial institutions are still under pressure to automate and be more efficient to keep up with growing customer expectations. 

Using automated workflows within your customer support software is a great option to speed up work around your customer experience team while your organization gets security-ready for AI and starts rolling that out strategically.

Keep reading to learn more about setting up workflows in Kustomer to improve efficiency within your customer experience team.

Real-world results: efficiency and accuracy gains

Kin Insurance migrated to Kustomer and thanks to native integrations and sophisticated workflows, Kin’s team could get a real-time data stream that their business intelligence team could build their reporting on. The best part? Technical business users could make a lot happen without requiring help from an engineer. And, this was also in line with their document retention and security policies - critical for financial services organizations.

There are other meaningful outcomes too. Companies that take advantage of Kustomer workflows see a reduction in average handle time. And, in general, whenever customer experience teams automate repetitive work, their agents’ job satisfaction increases and turnover can decrease.

Key challenges financial service teams face

Many of the key challenges that customer experience teams within financial services organizations face revolve around repetitive work and/or using multiple systems.

• Updating multiple systems manually or manually escalating issues can increase average handle time 
• Passing customers to find the right team member who can solve their issue can decrease CSAT
• Fragmented data silos leads to less effective strategic decision-making 

Another key challenge? Building and maintaining customer trust. A 2023 study found that 66% U.S. adults say they trust banks. Delivering a reliable, high-quality customer experience is key to building that trust with financial institution customers. Financial services platforms can make headway in delivering high quality, speedy customer support by leaning on automated workflows within their customer experience teams.

You may be asking yourself: if AI is the next big thing in tech, why would my team spend time setting up Workflows? In fact, they work even better together. Setting up Workflows will set you up for success with AI, since Kustomer’s workflows work with bidirectional handoff with AI Agents teams. So whether your organization is ready to roll out AI pronto or needs some time to implement it, setting up workflows now will complement AI, not compete with it or be redundant.

Some organizations have over 100 Workflows set up within Kustomer, and they can be highly customized to your organization’s needs and work within your tech stack. Here are some specific ways that Kustomer Workflows can serve your financial services organization:

Routing

Routing allows you to organize and collect conversations or tasks and route them to your agents using a set of criteria defined in queue rules. Routing conversations allows you to:

• Accurately calculate the estimated wait time
• Track and monitor user availability
• Measure team capacity against inbound volume for scalability
• Route custom tasks to teams

Kustomer makes it easy to route the right issues to the right team member for the job. Skills based routing allows you to route incoming conversations based on specific attributes your agents have, such as languages spoken, certifications, region, escalation level, or client service level. This is particularly useful for financial services organizations that need to ensure qualified representatives assist customers - for example, to a licensed mortgage loan officer or securities representative.

Example:

An insurance provider uses skills-based routing to connect customers with agents who are licensed in the customer’s state and specialize in the type of coverage they’re requesting—such as auto, homeowners, or life insurance. For example, when a customer in Florida requests a quote for flood insurance, the system automatically routes the conversation to an agent licensed in Florida with flood policy expertise, ensuring regulatory compliance and faster, more accurate guidance.

Tasks

For all of the specific things that your organization needs to do to support your customers, you can build custom versions of Tasks tailored to your unique workflow. Tasks help your teams manage non-conversation work and cross-collaborate with other teams in your organization.

Tasks can include things like follow-up calls, approvals, escalations, processing refunds and so on.

You can combine tasks and routing to get even more value out of these systems. These custom tasks can be configured through forms or API for greater flexibility.

Example:

A finance team might use a Task to track follow-ups on missing tax documents during the onboarding process.

Updating external tools

While Kustomer is a comprehensive CRM and customer support tool, many banks use other tools within their tech stack to manage these functions. Kustomer’s workflows can automatically update these external systems, helping to keep data synced across the organization. This can be configured to almost any timeframe, or perhaps when agents close a conversation - whatever works best for your organization.

Analytics

Kustomer integrates with many data and analytics platforms including Salesforce, Looker, Snowflake, Segment, and more. If you’re housing your financial institution’s data elsewhere for business analytics, we make it easy to automatically port in the relevant data from the CRM and customer support system.

Internal communications

You can boost efficiency with your internal communication, not just customer-facing communications. Kustomer integrates with Slack using workflows, and can be customized. You can keep everyone that you need to in the loop, which can help your team address issues or see areas for improvement thanks to this enhanced visibility.

Example:

A finance team could send a Slack update to the risk team whenever a customer submits a high-value transaction for review—helping them act quickly and keep audit trails transparent.

Closing thoughts

Every organization is trying to do more with less right now, and for many financial services companies, there are huge gains to be had with automating more of the business processes stemming within your customer experience department.  

The most important part: Kustomer workflows allow financial services customer support teams to do more with less while meeting necessarily compliance standards. Check out more about Kustomer’s security to learn more.

Ready to see how Kustomer can transform your institution’s customer support? Check out the product tour or schedule time to talk with our sales team to learn more today!