Standing up to every challenge

Getting closer to customer journeys

A growing retail and corporate market presence, supported by a flourishing base of small businesses and sole traders, makes Bank Millennium one of Poland’s largest banks. Multichannel services gave customers the freedom to transact at the branch, over the phone, via the website or through the mobile app.

However, over time, the strain of managing those separate channels took its toll. Even basic tasks, like making IVR or routing changes, took ages. With costs spiraling and the business reliant on a limited legacy on-premises telephony system, it was time for a change.

“We had to get a closer understanding of customer journeys and reduce effort for supervisors, agents and the IT team,” said Krzysztof Ciąpała, Contact Center Development Manager at Bank Millennium. “And we knew that meant upgrading to a proven omnichannel solution.”

Merger announcement raised the stakes

The decision to invest in a system upgrade wasn’t taken lightly. “We needed to be completely sure,” said Tomasz Grązka, Head of IT at Bank Millennium. After two years of discussions and extensive reviews involving many stakeholders, a successful proof of concept sealed the choice of the Genesys Engage™ solution.

During the first phase of the inbound and outbound migration, it was announced the company would merge with Eurobank. Suddenly, Ciąpała and Grązka had an even bigger project ahead of them — consolidate people, processes and technology from both companies’ contact centers.

“Fortunately, we found Eurobank was another Genesys customer,” said Grązka. “It was a tremendous team effort. We rose to every challenge and solved every problem together.”

Flying start with more to come

Before, Bank Millennium had around 450 agents supported by five siloed systems. Post-merger, the bank is on the path to unify its contact center operations, supplemented by another 150 advisors (from 450 to 600) serving around 2.5 million customers. Together, they handle about 300,000 calls a month. For certain areas, such as mortgages, all communications are managed by one group of product experts while others, like outbound sales and collections, can involve various advisors.

“Genesys Engage enabled us to take the merger in stride, adding 34% more seats and meeting a 47% increase in clients with consistently good service throughout,” said Grązka. “We simply couldn’t have done that with our legacy on-prem system.”

In recognition of those achievements, the bank won “Most Reliable Financial Institution.” Results to date include 20% shorter queue times, 10% fewer abandoned calls and a 10-second drop in average handle time. Add to this time and money savings from decommissioned infrastructure, and the migration is already showing a return on the investment.

That ROI figure will only grow as the bank launches integrated workforce management and co-browsing tools — two other unobtainable goals with previous legacy technology. It will also migrate email and chat communications onto the Genesys solution.

Fast-forward onto the frontline

Two weeks after deployment, just when the project team thought there couldn’t be any more surprises, the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the world. Normal call volumes swelled, with vulnerable customers inquiring about loan and mortgage repayment holidays, for example.

“We began our Pandemic 2020 project to get our agents working from home,” concluded Ciąpała. “Our old system had no remote worker options but, with Genesys, in just three days, we had built the necessary infrastructure. And we’re already beginning to talk about the implementation of voicebots.”