Beyond Bank has boosted its call centre experience and digital capabilities, leading to a customer satisfaction uplift of 92 percent.
Its efforts also led to a 30-second reduction in call time and a 50 percent decrease in training time for agents.
The bank has re-platformed its contact centre operations to run on a Genesys Cloud platform.
“Within the contact centre, we had a legacy on-premises solution that hadn’t been upgraded in a while,” Brent Alexander, national manager for Beyond Bank’s call centre told Digital Nation.
“Being a customer-focused and driven organisation, it probably wasn’t meeting the expectations of our customers in terms of the functionality and services where we wanted to offer them.
“We did a bit of a review and thought it was time to move to a new platform, something that could unlock the customer experiences that we thought our customers deserved and should have.”
The bank moved to the Genesys Cloud platform which provided the bank with greater functionality and cost-savings, according to Alexander.
“What we were interested in with the cloud product was the ability to see new features being rolled out every week,” he said.
The ability to tick a [box] and it is turned on” was also attractive.
“From a cost and resource perspective, [it’s] significantly cheaper to maintain, no hardware to replace on an ongoing basis. It made a lot of financial sense to move to a cloud-supported product.”
Alexander said integration into the contact centre environment was a straightforward process.
The bank has been a Genesys cloud customer for roughly six years.
“We recently extended our contract through to 2029,” Alexander said.
When implementing the platform, the bank took additional time to ensure it integrated well with its Dynamics CRM.
This was to create a better employee experience and deliver functionality to customers such as enabling the ability to identify customers through their telephone passcode before they spoke to an agent.
Allowing “customers to complete half the identification process before they got through to an agent reduced handling time by about 40 seconds.
Customer satisfaction also increased when the bank introduced wait callback functionality.
The platform informs customers of rough wait times then offers an automated callback that preserves their position in the queue.
“Almost as soon as we turned the callback functionality on, our customers started using it,” Alexander said.
“The feedback around wait times almost disappeared overnight, even though we still had those periods of waits, because customers are able to go about their day and then just have the call back.
“They were the probably two big early wins.”
Introducing chatbots and AI
Beyond Bank has recently resumed plans around working with chatbots and AI.
“In the last 18 months, we’ve started to progress a number of initiatives,” Alexander said.
“We believe that AI allows us to differentiate the experiences in alignment with our strategy of being customer obsessed and creating those great relationships with our customers.”
Alexander said the two that are in practice now include predictive routing of calls, which is reducing handling time on average by 13 percent.
“Predictive routing looks at all of the agents that are available and asks who is best placed to take this call from an experience perspective [and] handle time perspective,” Alexander said.
“It routes the call to that staff member, so you have more efficient staff taking the first call off the rank.”
Alexander said the bank’s chatbot enables it to respond to more customer conversations then before.
With the AI assisted chatbot now live, Beyond Bank incorporated data from its top 20 queries, working with Genesys and QPC Australia to build the function.
“We’re now answering 50 percent more chats than we did previously. That’s because it’s available 24/7 and our customers can access it when they want to, at whatever time of the day.”
He said the chatbot is designed to detect 17 “intents” – intentions for making contact – initially.
“It would have been really easy to pick 50 or 60, launch them out there then some of them may not be great,” Alexander said.
“We pride ourselves on our customer satisfaction and experience. Anything we release, we want to be at the same level, that our staff would give a customer.
With customers and staff responding well to the changes, Alexander said he’ll continue focusing on the bank’s chatbot functionality.
“Right now, it’s an unauthenticated chatbot. It’s [responding to] generic queries,” he said.
“We want to unlock self-service in a secure manner for customers so that they can interact and do their whole query in their channel of choice.
“We’re building out our integration layer now, working through that process and soon, hopefully, customers will be able to do transactions via the web chat channel in the privacy of their own homes at all hours of the day.
“That’s probably the most exciting for me,” Alexander said.