Digital-first banking in critical times

Serial innovators

The largest financial services group in Norway, DNB intends to remain the country’s preferred bank while driving for growth, the best digital solutions and lower costs. Key to its success is the amazing customer experience (CX) its agents provide throughout Oslo, Bergen, Gjøvik, Trondheim, Stockholm, Riga and several branch offices. These 1,500 agents handle 8 million annual interactions with voice, digital channels and work items centrally managed through the Genesys™ solution. This ensures high FCR and accurate forecasting across 200 agent skill sets and competencies.

Intelligent self-service

The bank’s digital-first approach, which helped absorb traffic spikes during the COVID-19 pandemic, began more than a decade ago. “DNB was one of the first Norwegian banks to offer an SMS service, enabling customers to check account balances and transfer money with just a few keystrokes,” said Jan Thomas Lerstein, Head of Emerging Technologies at DNB. “We introduced chat in 2009 and were an early adopter of social media and chatbots.”

Results achieved to date include a 30% call reduction with a 50% reduction in the number of unresolved issues transferred from the chatbot to live agents, from 20% to just 10% of calls.

Routing-optimized loans and mortgages

The latest phase of the bank’s digital strategy focuses on using a wide range of AI and machine learning technologies to solve business problems. Specifically, it wants to explore how Genesys can optimize performance of its loan and mortgage teams above and beyond normal skills-based and bullseye routing.

“As a financial institution, interactions regarding loans and mortgages are seen as particularly high-value interactions,” said Lerstein. “Routing these interactions to the best suited agent in a timely manner is crucial. The clients are often in ‘buyer’s mode’ and making sure that we can deliver on speed, quality and customer experience can determine whether the customer chooses to take the loan with us. So, we decided to pilot Genesys Predictive Routing to see if we could maximize our agents’ efficiency and skill sets. Our overall goal was to reduce handle and wait time.”

Ensuring industry security standards

Strictly adhering to financial services privacy laws, the company adopted a highly secure hybrid cloud setup. This meant DNB controlled and anonymized data onsite before it was pushed to the cloud for constant updates and refinement of the predictive model — without the need for local system changes.

Genesys on-premises components used for predictive routing were deployed using containers, in line with the bank’s multicloud CX strategy.

“Genesys helped build an AI engine using completely anonymized and encrypted data,” said Ketil Berge, Technical Lead at DNB.

Allowing six months for planning and another six for testing, the pilot covered 90 agents managing 22 queues with an average of 46 concurrent agents. Incoming calls are identified via the Genesys Voice Portal and routed to the agent with the best matching skills and performance statistics.

Above-and-beyond results

DNB beat expectations and achieved a 6.5% AHT reduction, against an original target of 2.7%. And the bank’s extremely high customer satisfaction rate (5.8 out of 6) prior to Genesys Predictive Routing hasn’t dropped with the improvement in handle time efficiency.

“We started to see benefits in the first week, which kept on improving with data updates and better matches,” added Berge. “There was also a significant reduction in queue time. And although we’re still awaiting the final results, we expect to see a positive impact on customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score.”

DNB has a tight routing integration with workforce engagement management. The selection of interactions to be routed to agents is based on their work schedules. Genesys Predictive Routing fit smoothly with this approach and took advantage of the predictability of agents and skills assigned to a specific activity at a moment in time. The solution delivered results both in agent and caller surplus scenarios.

Like most innovation projects, the pilot uncovered some interesting insights. Post-pilot phases will focus on aspects such as finding the optimum balance between the use of technology and the personal development needs of the workforce.

“Genesys Predictive Routing enables our agents to get to more high-value, time-critical calls and wrap them up faster,” concluded Lerstein. “That means they have more time to close more deals. And, most importantly, there’s less chance of the customer taking their business elsewhere due to queuing frustrations.”