Bringing concierge customer service to members

Advia Credit Union has a mission to provide financial advantages by offering the quickest, easiest solutions to its more than 170,000 members across Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. In working to maximize the value of its wide range of financial services, Advia looked to implement a customer service experience that embraced a similar philosophy of people helping people.

Challenge

“Our institution had experienced rapid growth due to acquisitions and mergers. As a result, there were different systems and multiple points of contact to reach us. And there was no accountability for servicing — it was hard to do business with us,” said Rey Chavez, Director of the Member Contact Center at Advia Credit Union. “Our approach started with a simple initiative to look for a live chat option, but when we partnered with a third-party vendor to handle the webchat and after-hours servicing, it didn’t solve all of our issues.”

Advia found that as the third-party vendor’s volume grew, so did the cost of the service. And that created more tickets for the in-house team to handle. Members also wanted more ways to contact Advia; calls were doubling in volume — the customer contact team was left frustrated because of the rising number of requests.

“We wanted to see how we could deflect some of the more common questions into a bot or FAQ to service the members faster through another channel,” said Chavez. “When we did our research in the AI space, it became very evident that the Genesys DX solution was going to be much more forward-thinking. It had the simplest user interface, and we knew their team would be a good partner to help us map out our AI journey.”

During that research process, Advia found Genesys DX to be a robust solution. Its natural language processing (NLP) could handle customer queries — and that made it easy for agents to use in their daily workflow.

Solution

To best serve its members, Advia evolved the customer contact center into a multichannel operation. It brought live chat back in-house to boost the overall experience, replaced and updated the FAQ section of the website with consistent messaging, and implemented a ticket system through a chatbot for after-hours servicing. With the assistance of Genesys DX, Ava — the AI-enabled Advia chatbot — launched with great success.

“We consider ourselves a forward-thinking company in adopting technology, and the Genesys DX team was there for us through every step of the process,” said Chavez. “The team did a great job in helping us to structure the bot, and it has taken off right from day one.”

Advia rolled out the chatbot in a phased approach, allowing members to become comfortable with the new options. Ava provides a type of concierge service for members, especially during those critical situations when mortgage or loan applications might result in a particular set of questions.

Results

Ava handles most requests coming in from Advia members. “Our members have given us a strong, positive response and great reviews,” said Chavez. “We have heard that they like to do what they want, when they want, during any hour of the day and that Ava is receptive and quick to answer.”

On the agent side, there has been a positive response as well. “Our team can use the tiles in the dashboard to understand what questions are being asked with NLP to zero in on any changes we need to make to Ava,” said Chavez. “It allows us to make sure we are driving that member into the right lane of self-service to handle their requests. As a result of Ava handling so much, our agents can now address more inquiries through various channels like social media.”

Since the launch of Ava, Advia has experienced:

• A 75% deflection rate of total contact volume for customers
• A 15-second agent speed of answer, resulting in near real-time pickup of the conversation when it transitions from Ava to the agent
• An average handle time around 9 minutes for chat sessions, similar to that attained when using the third-party vendor, but with resolution of deeper questions
• An estimated cost savings of more than $400,000 per year by eliminating the third-party vendor
• The ability to centralize member communication into one contact center operation to drive efficiency and consistency

Looking ahead, Advia will launch an internal bot to help agents quickly look up policies and procedures as they respond to complex customer queries.