Customer service

In experimenting with a chatbot on its mobile app, TD Bank will have to tackle the same issue facing several of its rivals — how to automate conversations with consumers and decide at what point it’s time to switch to a human.

Verba's two-decade career at one of the East Coast's fastest-growing banks began with an old-fashioned letter to a local bank when she was in her late 40s and an epiphany about work-life balance.

Want employees to feel empowered to make decisions to help customers? Rewarding that behavior is one way to reinforce the message. Here’s how one South Dakota community bank goes about it — in a splashy, Super Bowl-sized way.

The Wall Street giant on Wednesday played up its customer service skills, saying that representatives of its Marcus personal-loan unit answer calls within 10 seconds.

Culture is key at Washington Trust, as it is at many of the 75 banks in our Best Banks to Work For rankings. Having a custom word to describe its community-oriented philosophy helps fuel conversations about it, and letting employees personalize the meaning (no scripts here) fuels a sense of empowerment and enthusiasm.

Financial firms say the database is unreliable and would like to see it removed from public view. But the industry would also lose access to competitive insights that can be gleaned from the massive trove of consumer complaints.

Today’s primitive question-and-answer programs will mature into sophisticated conversational agents, which will help customers transact and may even be capable of understanding emotional cues, experts say.

Regions Financial is taking steps across its 1,500-branch network to embrace consumers with autism and train its staff to help them. Business development, not just compassion, is part of the motivation.