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This customer is one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organizations. It serves its customers from offices and branches in cities across the United States including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Seattle, Miami, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Through its Wealth and Personal Banking, Commercial Banking, Private Banking, Global Banking, and Markets and Securities Services, the bank offers a full range of traditional banking products and services to individuals, including high net worth individuals, small businesses, corporations, institutions and governments.
The bank's operations team in the United States handles over 36 million calls per year, many of these via their existing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. Our technology was implemented on the bank’s voice self-service retail banking voice application. This application was designed primarily for handling U.S. customer inquiries on personal checking accounts, though it also supported home loans, car loans, student loans, and similar retail services.
The client’s voice application handles inquiries for available balance, funds transfer, transaction information, payment history, and general information. It serves account holders via publicly accessible toll-free numbers. While the IVR solution front-ended all incoming phone calls, many callers were opting for an agent and the average handle time for automated calls was high.
During the initial proof of concept (PoC) period with the customer, we implemented our technology to determine what effect dynamically adjusting the audio playback rate of voice prompts in their IVR would have on voice self-service performance. During this period, we ran A/B tests on over 40,000 phone calls over a two week period. We also used Gyst Analytics to collect data on caller behavior as it relates to engagement within the voice application. Existing voice prompts were speed adjusted in direct relation to individual caller skills.
During the initial proof of concept (PoC) period with the customer, audio playback speed adjustment levels of 102, 115, 117, 119, and 121 percent were used. A playback level of 100 indicates the normal playback rate of the audio, 115 represents 115 percent of normal, and so forth.
In summary, the results indicated:
After deploying our technology, the customer realized a decrease in the average handle time in the voice self-service system from 90 seconds down to 83 seconds. Simultaneously, they experienced an improvement in the self-service rate within the voice system - fewer calls went to agents as a result. additionally, callers using the speed adjusted audio had 27.22% more engagement (Conversation Turns) with the IVR over callers using standard audio. These callers also encountered 18.5% fewer error messages and thus, had to reenter information 18.5% fewer times.
The bottom line was a five month ROI on the technology for the bank.
We've made it easy for you to give Gyst a test drive with your own callers and your own voice applications.
Via our Proof of Concept (PoC) plan, we first request a cloned version of your voice application from you. Then, we enhance this cloned version of the application with Gyst by inserting calls to our web API. Next, we run both versions of the voice application side-by-side in limited production - starting with only a trickle of phone calls to the Gyst enhanced version of the voice application.
As the call volume to the Gyst enhanced version is slowly increased over time, we use A/B tests to compare performance metrics for call handle times, voice self-service rates, reduced caller input errors, increased IVR usage/engagement, goal completion, and other metrics. This will unequivocally prove out the technology benefits for your organization and your callers as they engage with your voice application. As an added bonus, we'll perform a highly detailed analysis of your current voice application efficiency and performance using our Gyst Analytics software. You can see the level of detail you'll receive in this report here.
The PoC usually takes about 2 weeks to accumulate enough phone calls for A/B testing, though we can adjust this time period to suit your daily call volume and sampling rate preferences. And if you have an existing Amazon Web Services account, the PoC can usually be administered and paid for via your existing contracts and volume agreements with AWS. While the PoC is provided for you as a fully implemented turnkey service, you can read more about the technical details on how Gyst is implemented in AWS here.
