Beyond Bank has entered a new phase of a customer experience upgrade with plans to roll out an AI-driven chatbot and voice biometrics to improve the identification and verification experience.
The bank, which has around 300,000 customers and 48 branches nationwide, has been transforming its customer experience for several years.
At the heart of the customer experience overhaul is the use of Genesys Cloud CX 3 in its contact centre operations, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the “centre of our universe” for customer data, the bank’s national manager of customer relationship centre Brent Alexander told a Genesys summit in Sydney.
“At the start, we made a really conscious decision about what the centre of our universe was, and that was our CRM,” he said.
“Every piece of interaction across our business must be loaded into the CRM to give our employees one customer view, no matter what channel they use.
“Whether it be a marketing email, whether it be a letter from our credit team, interaction in the branch, our employees can see all of that in our CRM.”
Alexander said that Genesys had been supportive of that from a capability standpoint.
“Genesys integrated straight into the CRM, including the interaction records, which obviously was a good thing for our staff,” he said.
While the pandemic caused Beyond Bank to pause some of its integration and expansion work, the company is now resuming with the “next phase of [the] experience orchestration” kicking off recently.
“That’s really about AI chatbot, a web messenger nuanced with voice biometrics to improve the identification and verification experience,” Alexander said.
“Then, from there, [we’ll start] to use other bits of AI in terms of predicting engagement, predictive routing to understand our customer’s journey and then provide our employees with the information they need at their fingertips when they need it, to have that personalisation and experience that feels like a one-on-one connection.”
Alexander said Beyond Bank intends to move “really slowly” with the chatbot’s introduction to ensure customer satisfaction and trust aren’t compromised, and that staff also remain onboard.
The rollout will be “slow” and “methodical”, he said.
Done well, the bot could actually build trust among customers with respect to their service expectations, Alexander said.
“The customer [knows they] can come to you and can get what they need done on the channel,” he said.
“Then, when they need that really in-depth conversation about their financial wellbeing or their financial future, we’re there for them on the other channels, talking to them.”
He added that the bot would also be good for staff, taking care of simpler interactions and leaving them to focus on complex or value-adding discussions.