Boosting customer satisfaction and productivity with a cloud solution

Chile’s largest bank

BancoEstado is the only public bank in Chile. Founded in 1855, it operates the largest in-person and virtual customer service network in the nation. The bank serves more than 14 million customers — 72% of the Chilean population. This is the highest banking penetration in Latin America.

But the bank’s social impact goes deeper. BancoEstado provides products specially designed to expand banking access to underprivileged Chileans. And by locating its contact center in the city of Lota, it carried out an inclusive social project. The contact center was created in 2002 as part of a local mining project. Today, the contact center is the largest and most important source of employment for this community. It has 1,300 employees, of whom 85% are women.

“One of the ways to support labor reconversion was to install a contact center built from scratch in a new building, the largest and most modern one in Lota,” said Ángela Molina Carvajal, Head of Channel Quality Management at BancoEstado. “The initiative created 1,300 jobs, something that greatly helps the community.”

Today, the Lota contact center is one of the busiest in Chile — managing all types of inquiries, including customer service, collections and outbound commercial campaigns, among others. The contact center’s average volume is 8 million calls per month; however, most incoming calls are resolved through the IVR with 8% or 660,000 calls handled by live agents. Self-service allows BancoEstado to meet the daily demand of customers at the appropriate time and opportunity.

Leading through the pandemic

BancoEstado customers are accustomed to going to the nearest branch or calling the contact center if they have any questions. When the pandemic broke out, the government ordered a lockdown in March 2020. It also implemented a health contingency plan, in which in-person visits to the bank’s branches where restricted. The bank looked for solutions and decided teleworking would enable the best service to customers.

But the contact center didn’t have the technical capability to enable teleworking. As a result, it was operating at half capacity to meet social distancing protocols, which impacted the quality of customer attention and satisfaction. Today, after using a Genesys solution to make teleworking more feasible, the contact center distributes 33% of its operations among other branches in the country. As a result, 340 people, mainly located in the Valparaíso, Santiago Metropolitan, and Aracaunía regions, are connected — allowing them to remotely attend to clients’ requests.

“We were not living up to what is expected of us or what we ourselves expect,” said Luis Chávez Tuesta, Head of Software and Product Development at BancoEstado. His mission was to lead the team that moved the contact center to the cloud.

As BancoEstado looked to build on its previous Genesys Engage solution, the migration marked a new chapter where the bank evaluated various vendors. “At BancoEstado, for each initiative we look for partners who can help us provide the best service to customers,” said Chávez Tuesta.

In its search to find a partner who could help them orchestrate the best customer experiences, BancoEstado chose the Genesys Cloud platform due to the support of Genesys Professional Services, which provided abundant technical documentation, and the platform’s native integration with existing third-party products.

A fast, incremental approach to the cloud

The BancoEstado cloud migration involved not only a change of technology, but also careful implementation of a new management model, in which the company’s IT team implements and manages technologies with the help of Genesys and other partners. The bank opted for a gradual change to minimize errors that can arise in a technology transformation.

“We didn’t want to make a big-bang kind of change, because that would inevitably lead to errors,” said Chávez Tuesta. “It had to be interactive and gradual. Considering the results, I think this approach, with the help of Genesys, was very successful.”

The phased transition began with attention to their phone line to address customer banking emergencies; everyone involved was highly motivated from the beginning. It was an intensive process in which BancoEstado used the technical documentation from Genesys to carefully understand the new customer service model that included everything from the simplest services to the most complex ones.

“The move was very fast,” said Molina Carvajal. “Initially, we thought the implementation was going to be very difficult, but with a synchronized team effort from the bank and Genesys, we did it in two and a half months, with more than 70% of our services live and running.”

Enabling customer visibility and remote working

Before the pandemic, contact center applications weren’t connected to other IT systems within the bank. Agents received calls and logged them in their own application, and other banking teams had no visibility into what was happening.

“When we integrated our Genesys solution with Salesforce, we got a 360-degree view of the customer,” said Molina Carvajal. “This was a huge gain. It let us apply the concept of ‘I know my customer,’ which is fundamental.”

At the same time, the IT team led by Chávez Tuesta integrated the Genesys solution with the bank’s legacy systems by developing a connector in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Along with helping BancoEstado integrate various systems, the Genesys cloud solution allowed it to automate important processes. And having fully trained teams and leaders at the call center, the bank reduced its average monthly contacts by 10% — about 100,000 fewer calls — allowing it to better serve customers.

BancoEstado was also able to delocalize 300 of its 1,400 agents, allowing it to meet social distancing requirements in the contact center. Through a mix of remote and on-site work, it was able to retain its original pre-crisis staff, with no reductions.

Through hard work, the call center also improved agent shift adherence with Genesys Cloud Workforce Engagement Management. This capability simplified workforce planning and scheduling, providing BancoEstado data on what times were most productive, improving and optimizing its customer service time and attention.

“Genesys Cloud allows us to do all of our management ourselves, because the systems our agents use have a simple and intuitive format,” said Luis Iturrieta Muñoz, Operations Manager of the 24-hour contact service at BancoEstado. “This lets us reduce management times and avoid having to resort to costly solutions. It also makes the agent training process very simple and user-friendly, allowing agents to learn to use the system in a matter of minutes.”

Improving contact center KPIs

After using Genesys Cloud for a few months, BancoEstado saw the success of its IT strategy in dramatic improvements of its main contact center KPIs.

Service levels reached 90%, an improvement of more than 20 points. FCR reached 70%. And AHT went from 270 to 250 seconds, a 7% drop.

Perhaps the greatest achievement was an improvement in customer satisfaction. The bank’s NPS more than doubled — from 24 to 54.

“One of the significant milestones of our migration to Genesys Cloud relates to the large amount of information provided by the system,” concluded Iturrieta Muñoz. “This lets us control all variables in a single tool, which helps us make decisions, in advance and with great accuracy. Before the migration, we had to resort to several different tools to obtain key service data, and we couldn’t get that data in real time. This changed significantly after the migration and allowed us to improve our reaction times to everyday challenges.”