Our client, one of the largest credit unions in the United States, has been working with Concentrix for two decades. Back in 2013, when IVR technology was just starting to grow beyond simple call routing, we developed its first dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) banking application. If “press 1 for checking” sounds familiar, it’s because many applications still use those same DTMF commands today.
Challenge
Fast forward to 2021 and the client approached us with a challenge to modernize its banking application experience. It wanted more functionality, flexibility, and less reliance on hardware licensing. Oh, and it also wanted to boost member satisfaction while reducing calls being transferred to advisors.
Challenge accepted.
We took on the six-month pilot of the user experience and established success criteria to determine customer satisfaction through member surveys. Our longstanding relationship with the client, as well as our expertise with its fintech and payments vendor, made us the go-to choice for this project.
Solution
First, we reviewed the prior DTMF solution to see who was using it and how. We found that it was mainly power users who were using it to do simple tasks, like access their checking account balance. But the average user was not using it, likely because they didn’t want to memorize a handful of simple DTMF interactions to get to their task.
So, we designed an interactive voice response (IVR) application with a natural language interface. This allowed members to use their voice to access their member accounts. No more listening to menu prompts and pressing a series of buttons. Now, they could simply say “checking balance” and be done with it. And to make it even better, the new IVR experience was more secure than the existing solution.
We also recommended moving away from the client’s existing on-premise model to a secure, flexible, cloud-based solution using the latest Amazon Web Services Lex technology.
But we didn’t stop there. We ran an optimization exercise where we had a speech science expert listen to calls and review interactions to understand caller behavior and suggest modifications to fine-tune the new IVR experience and improve containment.
This included adding words or phrases that callers were using, but which had not been originally programmed, and designing changes based on caller behavior, such as error handling around collecting authentication tokens that verify a user’s identity within the application.
Outcomes
The client’s original pilot request was for six months, but we added an additional 90 days to trial other opportunities to increase containment. During that trial, the client achieved:
- 28% IVR utilization
- 4.3% CSAT improvement
- 83.2% containment
Following the pilot, the client requested our help in creating a new banking IVR to replace the two IVRs it was running.
Contact us to learn how our conversational AI, natural language understanding, and enhanced IVR solutions can modernize your channels and help you deliver a more personalized, conversational experience.