Optimising customer experiences through artificial intelligence

Beyond Bank is one of the largest customer-owned banks in Australia, serving over 300,000 customers in the country. It’s guided by the belief that employees are key to delivering superior customer experiences. It prioritises the need for agile contact centre operations to adequately serve evolving customer and employee expectations, while ensuring business continuity in today’s volatile global environment.

Modernising the contact centre platform

To deliver a best-in-class customer experience, Beyond Bank set out to modernise its contact centre technology. The previous on-premises platform was difficult to update and customise at the speed customers demanded. The bank sought to empower employees with an agile platform to satisfy customers’ expectations for seamless omnichannel support.

Rather than investing heavily to upgrade its legacy system, Beyond Bank chose the all-in-one Genesys Cloud platform to enhance its customer service delivery.

“Genesys aligns closely with our belief that viewing everything through the customer lens is key to delivering differentiated experiences,” said Brent Alexander, National Manager, Customer Relationship Centre at Beyond Bank. “Today, that requires continual innovation, which is exactly what Genesys Cloud helps us achieve through its robust capabilities and continuous release of new features and enhancements.”

“Having had very little innovation in the contact centre platform over the past 10 years, new updates released every single week in Genesys Cloud is one of the key features for us,” added Alexander. “In a world where resources are limited and stretched, the fact that it’s all automated through the Genesys platform is great.”

Enhancing the employee experience

Moving to Genesys Cloud proved to be swift and smooth for Beyond Bank. While there was a natural apprehension to change among employees at first — given their varying technology competence levels — the single intuitive interface of the Genesys platform made it easy for staff to transition to the platform. This reduced the planned training period in half. Offering seamless integration with its CRM system, the robust cloud platform gives agents the information they need on a unified system for end-to-end visibility of the customer journey.

For a shift that would typically take six months to realise similar benefits, Beyond Bank recorded a 30-second reduction in call times overnight with the new cloud solution.

Before migrating to Genesys Cloud, Beyond Bank struggled to optimise its workforce productivity and staff scheduling to align with its call volume and customer demands. Genesys Workforce Engagement Management equips the Beyond Bank team with a complete suite of capabilities for more accurate call forecasting, staff scheduling and actionable analytics to optimise workforce performance.

Providing employees with the flexibility to work from home without compromising security and compliance regulations has been a long-term vision of Beyond Bank. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, it had to execute on this vision two years earlier than planned.

“The speed at which we’ve been able to shift employees from onsite to remote working has seen improvements in their productivity and happiness, which wouldn’t have been possible on our old system,” said Alexander.

Genesys Cloud has allowed Beyond Bank to realise its priorities for broader geographic coverage, employee diversity and workforce flexibility. “You can’t have great relationships with your customers and provide great customer service unless your staff is happy,” he added.

Increasing functionalities for better customer experiences

For Beyond Bank, call wait times are one of the main parameters that influence customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. Introducing announced wait times and callback features has been crucial in enhancing customer satisfaction.

“As soon as we implemented call wait time notifications, we could see the impact it had on customer experience,” said Alexander. “It’s got to a point where CSAT scores don’t decline, even with longer than expected wait times, because customers are empowered with information about the wait time and can choose whether to wait or call back later. With Genesys Cloud, Beyond Bank has improved its CSAT score from 89 percent to 92 percent — demonstrating higher satisfaction levels across all five metrics.”

The introduction of AI

Over the years, Beyond Bank has been served well by the Genesys Cloud platform. But it was always looking to identify ways in which the platform could enable additional value.

“We were aware that Genesys is constantly adding additional capabilities to its cloud platform, and we were very keen to determine how those capabilities could support our agents,” said Alexander. “We were particularly interested in how new features powered by artificial intelligence could help.”

The first AI-powered feature the bank activated was predictive call routing. It was trialed with a small group of agents for two weeks before being rolled out across all three contact centres.

“Deployment of Genesys Predictive Routing was as simple as essentially flicking a switch,” said Alexander. “All the capabilities were already built into Genesys Cloud, which meant there was no need for protracted configuration and adjustments — it just worked.”

Genesys Predictive Routing adds value by directing calls to the most appropriate agent. Once fully operational, Beyond Bank found the feature was leading to a 13% overall reduction in call handle times.

“That is a very significant number when you’re talking about thousands of incoming calls each week,” said Alexander. “It allows us to provide a great user experience even at a time when customer numbers are continuing to grow.”

Looking to make further use of AI-powered tools, the Beyond Bank IT team turned its attention to chatbots. Genesys chatbots are designed to enable 24/7 service without the need for human intervention.

The first step in the chatbot deployment process was to identify the 20 most common customer questions via the company’s human-managed chat service. Journey maps were then created to guide customers to the information or service they were seeking.

“After a period of configuration, testing and refinement, we were able to integrate the chatbot with our existing chat service,” said Alexander. “During this process, we relied heavily on the expertise of both our technology partner QPC Australia and Genesys. Once fully functional, the AI-powered bot is now able to handle around 60 percent of all incoming chat requests.”

A future of continuous innovation

Alexander said the next phase of the AI-led project will be to create another chatbot that can handle transactions requiring authentication.

“At the moment, our chatbot is handling queries of a general nature where we don’t require the caller to identify themselves,” said Alexander. “The new chatbot will handle caller authentication and will then be able to provide specific financial data or undertake certain transactions.”

Beyond Bank also plans to deploy Genesys Agent Assist, which can automatically create summary notes of what’s discussed during a call.

Rather than an agent needing to type notes, these will be generated in real time by the AI-powered tool. This results in higher quality notes and allows the agent to focus on the customer rather than on typing during a call.

“Agent Assist also has a knowledge base capability,” said Alexander. “This allows it to automatically identify any suitable knowledge articles relating to the current call, providing agents with the additional knowledge they might require to answer specific questions.”

Beyond Bank looks forward to continuing its work with both Genesys and QPC Australia to add additional AI-powered features in the future.

“We’re very excited about the value AI technology can deliver for us,” concluded Alexander. “We’re confident that Genesys will remain a valuable partner for Beyond Bank.”