Newcastle Greater Mutual (NGM) Group plans to expand its AI capabilities in 2025, following a contact centre overhaul.
The overhaul saw the group create an omnichannel environment which included a virtual customer service portal, as part of efforts to uplift customer and staff experience.
Skilled staff in its physical branches are helping to respond to inbound digital enquiries.
“That’s allowed the contact centre to focus on incoming telephone calls and specialise in creating a very much more value-added opportunity for the customers calling us.”
Head of customer contact centre John Connolly told Digital Nation the vast majority of the of the digital contacts made by customers are completed in the branch network, leading to “a much better customer experience”.
Between better service levels within the contact centre and “more productive conversations with customers”, it’s also “provided people all across our branch network with skills that they would never have obtained before.”
The future AI boost
Connolly said the organisation’s future steps regarding AI integration focus on simplifying roles via agent assist technology made by Genesys.
“A lot of the focus over the last 12 months and certainly into the next 12 and 24 months will be to try and use technology – and a lot of that is AI – to make agents’ jobs simpler.”
“We’ve been involved in [using] agent assist technology that listens to the conversation between the agent and the customer and provides virtual support, ideas, links and information to the agent in real-time in a window on their desktop.
“The next stage for us is to look into some form of ‘copilot’ solution that not only provides hints and ideas and links and information, but it also can help them through some of our more complex processes in a staged way.”
Connolly said one example could be where the tool recognises the agent is talking to a customer about a disputed transaction and is able to identify which communication template is best to use.
“This technology has the opportunity to make all of those selections for the agent and make sure they get the job right.”
Connolly said the use of the technology so far provides real-time support for agents, and it can automatically summarise conversations and copy and paste them into the CRM, “which saves a heap of time and is much better for our quality assurance.”
Another aspect of the group’s AI work sees the company fast-track staff onboarding as the AI based technology has accelerated learning from “about four-to-five months to two-to-three months”.
Connolly adds, further exploration of ‘copilot’ capabilities is another top priority to help “our agents with more complex processes.”
The team also wants to look at using AI to capture emotional tone from customer contacts through sentiment analysis, which could enhance its ability to detect potential fraud.