NAB is now running all of its inbound contact centre operations nationally on Amazon Connect, a platform it emerged as an early adopter of four years ago, and that it has progressively deployed since.
The bank is now working on the final pieces of the migration – re-platforming its most complex contact centres onto Amazon Connect, and the development of predictive and progressive outbound dialling.
NAB first kicked off its contact centre cloud migration journey around four years ago, senior manager channels and product owner contact centre industrialisation program Rebecca Condon told AWS re:Invent last month.
Its first re-platforming target was a “simple” contact centre that was migrated in about six weeks.
But the bank’s contact centre environment spans “about 44” facilities and 4500 agents – whom NAB refers to as ‘colleagues’.
The time since that first contact centre migration have been spent preparing Amazon Connect to erun NAB’s “largest and most complex contact centres that support [its] key lines of business, which is business banking, personal banking, corporate finance and online banking,” head of technology, assisted channels – contact centre and conversational AI, Alex Kocher, told the same AWS conference.
“We’ve been concentrating on migrating our largest and more complex contact centres [in 2022], whereas in previous years we did the smaller ones,” Kocher said.
“We’ve got about three-to-six months to go before we finish the job.
“We’ve just got to do the outbound [operations] so predictive [and] progressive outbound is our final feature that we need to build – and then we can decommission our legacy platform and move into quite [a] large backlog of work that we’ve got as well.”
Condon said the re-platforming is a once-in-a-decade project.
“The last time we actually embarked on a change of this scale at NAB for our contact centres was 10 years ago,” she said, adding the bank doesn’t “often do change at this scale, for a reason.”
“We wanted to make sure that the change would make sense, it would land successfully, it would be well-received and adopted quickly, and enable us to continue to iteratively change at pace.”
Considerable effort has gone into both the agent and customer experience, and making the platform fit NAB’s needs.
Kocher noted there were key out-of-the-box differences between Amazon Connect and the contact centre platform it will ultimately replace.
“Amazon Connect is not the same as our legacy platform,” Kocher said.
“Our legacy platform evolved over many years and the business had a lot of creative ways of delivering their business outcomes and processes that were built within the application.
“[We had to] look at what Amazon Connect had out-of-the-box and look at how we had to configure it to meet the business requirements.”
The platform has also changed considerably over the four years that NAB has been deploying it.
“Amazon Connect today is different to the Amazon Connect it was four years ago. They’ve released hundreds of features over that time,” Kocher said.
“We did have to develop a few features ourselves [in the interim]. That’s probably the reason why it took so long, and so that’s been an interesting road.
“But working with AWS has helped us and helped them improve their product as well.”
The agent experience working with Amazon Connect is also considerably different. Kocher said NAB agents previously had to toggle “between 12 and 16 different applications” to respond to a single query.
Agents now work from an “integrated desktop”, where they are shown a consolidated view of the customer and all interactions leading up to that point. It also shows if the customer has already been authenticated, allowing the inquiry – and any handover between channels – to continue smoothly.
NAB skinned the out-of-the-box contact control panel (CCP) – the built-in interface where “agents can manage voice, chat and tasks”, according to AWS documentation – with a custom UI.
The CCP is also integrated with NAB’s CRM system “as well as [to a] new ‘miniapp’ that we’ve developed to understand the authentication status of the caller and manage authentication,” Kocher said.
“We want to be able to make sure that what we’re presenting to the agents when the call is presented to them is a consolidated view of that customer, so they can have some really personalised conversations and not have to waste time re-authenticating them, going back through that process.”
“We’ve had some really good feedback from our colleagues about that experience.”
While Amazon Connect is a boon for bankers and agents, the big touted benefits of the project are customer-facing.
Kocher said the bank’s “strategic ambition is to be digital-first and human where it matters”.
As people grow accustomed to speaking with smart devices like Alexa, “the majority of customers now prefer digital and having those automated conversations … as long as they know that there’s a human if they need to have further ‘human’ conversation.”
The bank could not enable this previously as its existing contact centre platform did not allow for seamless handover between contact centre and digital channels.
“Meeting our customers where they are and really bridging that gap between the digital experience as well as the in-person or the agent experience was really important,” Condon said.
“Quite often they’ll need to move between those channels, and so we really needed to have a platform with capability that would enable us to continue along that journey – not just for our customers but also, too, for our colleagues [agents].”
The bank is still seeing a high level of ‘containment’ – people whose calls can be satisfied by an automated or digital channel, in this case by Amazon Lex.
“Amazon Lex out-of-the-box is pretty good at understanding what people are saying but it does need to be tuned,” Kocher said.
“We had particular product names and things that our customers call us and talk about that are specific to NAB – various different words and phrases that may not be in the dictionary – so we did have to tune it and that’s an ongoing process as well.”
Kocher said NAB had also gotten better at asking “disambiguation questions” to better understand and triage the customer’s problem.
“A lot of people call up and say ‘credit card’. What does that mean? I don’t know. Let’s work out exactly what it is about a credit card that you’re calling about,” he said.
“So getting to the nub of the intent – we started off fairly generic and got those calls through to agents. Now we’re refining and getting better at those disambiguation questions.”
Ongoing work is also aimed at reducing the proportion of customer contacts that need to be moved from one person to another.
“We’ve all called contact centres before where you get moved from one department to another and it’s really frustrating, and certainly that’s been a focus for all of our contact centres over the last number of years,” Condon said.
“That’s continued to reduce – it’s around about 18 percent, and certainly a lot of the features on our backlog are really focused on continuing to get our callers/customers to the right banker first time to further reduce that 18 percent.”
NAB has worked with AWS Professional Services, Thoughtworks and VoiceFoundry on various aspects of the program of work, but ongoing works will be run by NAB staff.
Kocher said the bank had been able to hire a larger team from the savings it made on “third-party software support and maintenance” for the previous contact centre platform, as well as by switching off associated infrastructure.
Ongoing efforts by this team will include a “monthly cycle of innovation which will help us drive more simple, less complex inquiries into contained channels away from our bankers.”
Kate Weber attended AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas as a guest of AWS.