Domenick Forte

Domenick Forte has spent 27 years at Citizens, moving through strategy, analytics, lending, and customer delivery before becoming Chief Operating Officer for Consumer Banking in 2023. His current remit brings him close to some of the bank’s most consequential customer experience challenges, including consumer operations, the contact center, complaints, and fraud.

As Citizens modernizes its consumer business, Forte is focused on simplifying the processes underneath the experience for customers and employees alike. Rather than smoothing over friction at the front end, the work is aimed at removing the operational complexity that creates it in the first place.

The customer experience approach shows how that philosophy is beginning to take shape. Citizens is introducing LLM and agentic AI capabilities that can understand what customers are asking and complete straightforward tasks such as balance inquiries, address changes, transaction questions, and parts of the fraud claims process. The shift moves automation beyond directing customers to the right place and toward resolving more of the request itself.

Forte sees complaints through a similar lens, but with a wider payoff. Citizens has piloted AI that automatically logs complaints and strengthens root-cause analysis, giving the bank a better way to see patterns across individual interactions. A complaint can then become more than a case to close; it becomes evidence of where a process is repeatedly failing customers and where the underlying experience needs to change.

As more routine work moves into automated workflows, the role of employees changes with it. Forte’s model creates more room for people to focus on situations that call for judgment, advice, or a more personal conversation, while technology handles work that doesn’t benefit from the same level of human involvement.