Great Southern Bank is hoping to offer a virtual bank branch with extended opening hours “in every postcode” in the country, resourced with staff time freed up by modern and efficient technology.
Chief operating officer Naushad Ahmed told an Optus and NICE roundtable featuring the bank that the bank is intent on “moving services where it matters”.
In past years, that has seen the bank deploy NICE CXone as part of an “end-to-end” outsourced arrangement with Optus to facilitate many types of customer interactions with various financial services products to be handled by its bankers, brokers and other types of agents.
Ahmed noted that the technology enabled more complex inquiries and transaction types to be handled across multiple service channels.
But he also noted a renaissance of sorts for the branch network, with more customers seeking answers through it – and with rival branch networks either shrinking or under threat, Ahmed expressed interest in growing Great Southern Bank’s branch network and reach, albeit virtually rather than in terms of physical sites.
The resourcing for this network of virtual branches would effectively be the efficiency dividend that Great Southern Bank gains from implementing technology such as AI that improves staff productivity and frees up their time.
“What are we thinking about doing is actually creating a virtual branch in every postcode where you could actually video call us and talk to someone, and it’s open from 9am to 9pm – times that matter, not closing at four o’clock,” he said.
“We’re actually using the resources that’s been freed up with technology to create a virtual branch.
“And hopefully, the goal is by the end of the year, we can say we have a branch in every postcode.”
Contact centre upgrade
At the core of the efficiency or productivity dividend that Great Southern Bank has achieved is the Optus and NICE CXone relationship.
The bank deployed CXOne just before the pandemic, resulting in reduced call wait times – an average of 37 seconds per customer.
The system is used across its banking operations, hardship team and financial crime teams and enables a central source of truth and data for customer sentiment and feedback.
“It’s not just a telephony platform,” Ahmed said.
“It’s a solution that helps other parts of the business … that unlocks a lot of features for us to focus on just the customer and not to worry about the [operational] stuff.”
Ahmed said the customer-owned bank kicked off its transformation work to upgrade its telephone platform in 2019 following the appointment of a new CEO.
“One of the first things we did was develop a full-on new digital roadmap and IT modernisation plan and part of it identified IT infrastructure that [needed upgrading].”
Ahmed said that Great Southern Bank initially treated NICE “like a vendor” but more recently had sought a much closer relationship, with potentially some insight into and influence over the future roadmap for the platform.
The bank has also made some additional upgrades around its contact centre, refreshing its interactive voice response (IVR) for the first time in around 12 years.
One of the benefits of doing this was to reprioritise the menu options and get priority customers – such as scam or fraud victims – through to the right team much faster.
Annie Brett, head of customer contact centre at Great Southern Bank said with scams and fraud on the rise, the bank is now able to send callers to the appropriate person in seven seconds.
Likewise, for customers whose inquiries do not require an immediate response, the CXOne platform can route them to other secure channels for service.
“We’ve got all these different channels of choice for customers, but I think there’s always going to be a need for a human at the end of a call, particularly for a customer-owned bank,” Brett said.
The bank also flagged some AI use cases that are to be trialled in its environment.
This includes call auto-summarisation to aid compliance requirements while helping bankers and other agents stay focused on the customer while on a call.
In addition, there are plans to trial NICE’s Enlighten Copilot, which aims to improve how employees use the CXone platform.