Ashley Ross
“Exceptional customer service is not about just meeting expectations. It’s about consistently exceeding them and setting a new standard of excellence.”
Ashley Ross is Chief Client Care Officer and Head of Consumer Client Experience and Business Transformation at Bank of America, where she helps shape how the bank serves roughly 70 million clients. At that scale, the challenge is making a vast institution feel responsive while still adapting to the needs of each customer. Ross calls that individualization.
It all starts with listening. Ross’s team looks for recurring needs, then gets those insights to the people who own the relevant products and processes. Features such as recurring Zelle payments, along with changes to fraud claims and card-delivery tools, have grown directly from what clients were asking for.
Ross believes frontline employees and teams responsible for products, processes, and digital experiences need access to the same signals. To her, branch, phone, and digital aren’t separate experiences if the client is trying to complete the same task across them. It’s where high tech can give an advantage.
Her interest in the technology predates the current generative AI boom. Ross studied brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, including neural networks and AI. At Bank of America, she has described AI and machine learning as ways to turn large volumes of customer data into more relevant service.
EricaAssist does that directly for clients, responding to their accounts, transactions, and needs. More than 18,000 Bank of America service representatives now use the tool, with generative AI surfacing contextual guidance during conversations in under three seconds.
Ross is using customer feedback, connected channels, and AI to make a very large service operation more responsive without making it feel more impersonal. In July, ibex recognized her work with a CX Leadership Award, citing record client-experience performance and the expansion of EricaAssist.
Bank of America is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, serving consumers, small and mid-sized businesses, corporations, governments, and institutional investors. The company operates across the U.S. and more than 35 countries, serving more than 69 million consumer and small business clients alongside global banking, markets, wealth management, and investment services.