Implementing Attended Bots for a Major North American Financial Services Institution
A major American financial, retirement and investment firm receives over 3 million calls on average per year through its Client Service Centers, based in three locations across the United States. Approximately 15% of these calls are regarding loan and withdrawal options, also referred to as Money Out (MO) options, and include withdrawals, old loan payoffs for new loans, and new loan scenarios.
In order to derive the dollar value applicable to each Money Out customer, the Customer Service Associate (CSA) opens an application and captures 15+ client data attributes, accesses an internal client service system, and captures various customer financial statistics for each retirement plan. The CSR then must access a macro enabled Excel file while the customer is kept on hold for 10-15 minutes and plug in numerous fields gathered from internal applications to derive a possible loanable value that is applicable to the customer for each plan. To reduce hold time, increase data accuracy, and improve the customer experience, Accelirate implemented desktop bots, or attended automations, for the Client Service Center. These bots act as digital assistants on the CSA’s desktop, working in tandem with the user to help them execute the Money Out process.
AUTOMATED SOLUTION: MONEY OUT DIGITAL ASSISTANT (MODA)
The Digital Assistant is able to gather information across multiple internal user interface applications and platforms to combine key Money Out data into one comprehensive and user-friendly workbook. It also has a built-in capability to validate all customer-specific information generated through the internal data platforms based upon predefined business rules set by the business subject matter experts (SMEs). If the bot encounters a data discrepancy, it notifies the CSA immediately in the real time environment with an automated message delivered through a custom-built exception framework.
Implementing the Money Out Digital Assistant (MODA) allowed the CSAs to focus more on understanding the needs of clients and helped provide the most efficient Money Out experience without sacrificing the quality of customer care. The MODA runs during the CSA call and performs the data collection process while the agent listens to the customer’s needs. Not only does this eliminate the customer frustration of being placed on a lengthy hold, but the customer is able to speak to their concerns fully while the agent listens without further increasing the length of the call.
The data collection process that the MODA now handles results in the generation of an advanced workbook that includes details such as customer loanable and lineable balances, demographic information, participant balances, tax details, withdrawal models, a loan summary, money source mapping, vested balance, and total customer balance all in a standardized format.
SOLUTION RESULTS
The MODA completes end to end execution and provides the essential results to the CSA within 90 seconds. The successful implementation of this attended bot eliminated repeat calls from customers and reduced the call times from initiation to completion by 92.5% on average, thus saving a great deal of manual effort and customer frustration. The MODA also saves all relevant participant’s workbook files in a shared drive for future CSA reference. Currently, the digital assistant aids over 360 employees associated within the company.