Being there when it's needed most

Seeking customer-centric innovation

Kiwibank, the largest New Zealand owned bank, is passionate about delivering customer-centric services. It strives to give Kiwi the freedom to engage on their terms with a consistent experience across all channels.

“The average customer visits a branch once or twice a year and uses online, mobile or phone banking at least five times a week,” said Emma Noble-Beasley, General Manager Contact Centre at Kiwibank. “So, we’ve been moving toward digital banking for some time.”

The first digital transformation phase involved replacing legacy contact centre systems that had needed major investment just to stand still. “Modernising or adding features such as callbacks was challenging for a number of reasons,” added Noble-Beasley.

Instant hit with users

Facing rising traffic spikes during the pandemic, the bank’s contact centre management came under growing pressure to protect its staff and reassure concerned customers. Rather than derail its plans for digital transformation, Kiwibank shifted gears. It worked with Spark NZ, a contact centre partner, to accelerate the change and deploy Genesys Cloud.

“Our customer experience teams have found information at their fingertips, and a clean desktop is much better than the legacy situation,” said Noble-Beasley. “They became very strong advocates for the ongoing rollout. So, with tremendous support from Spark NZ, we went live in five weeks.”

Retiring five voice systems, the project saw the migration of 550 Cisco Finesse users along with 50 toll-free numbers and over 90 call flows that had to be built and tested.

“With the Kiwibank cloud-first strategy, it was really important for us to simplify our solutions,” said Noble-Beasley. “We already had a relationship with AWS, so moving to Genesys made perfect sense.”

Easy to deploy and configure

Kiwibank has leveraged vital capabilities of the Genesys Cloud CX^® offering such as inbound and outbound voice-based services that provide skills-based routing, callbacks, voicemail and campaign management. Other key features include consistent prerecorded disclosures and text-to-speech for instant customer in-queue messaging — enabling changes to be made in less than five minutes compared to three hours before.

Genesys Cloud Workforce Engagement Management delivers skill and capability routing; forecasting and scheduling; and real-time management, while also providing critical call recording for compliance. And Kiwibank can be more flexible with its teams’ schedules.

“Genesys Cloud Workforce Engagement has enabled us to realign shift patterns to match customer demand and allow staff to view rosters and schedules on their own mobile devices,” said Noble-Beasley. “We hear a lot about the challenges of finding and retaining talented people wanting to work remotely. Now, with Genesys Cloud we can offer them that modern flexible workplace.”

Gamification has also helped keep team members engaged while working remotely. “When we rolled out gamification, it created great excitement within the team, especially given that the country was back in lockdown,” added Noble-Beasley. “It gave our people a new way to engage and challenge each other to beat their personal bests.”

Fast business impact

Kiwibank started seeing results quickly. “By introducing callbacks, it saved customers more than 2.9 million minutes in hold time within the first three months,” said Noble-Beasley.

Outbound campaign management has ensured fairer work distribution, less misdialling and a 28% productivity improvement as agents are only connected when a customer picks up. One such area is Kiwi Insurance — reducing over eight hours of effort to just 30 minutes.

“We got 100% remote working capability,” said Noble-Beasley. “In addition, we equipped our people for success, optimised shifts to create a better work-life balance and ensured experts are available when customers need them most.”

Getting better outcomes with AI

Genesys Cloud also provided Kiwibank with a simple path to accelerate its AI strategy. The starting point was replacing a decade-old voicebot solution that made it difficult to understand customer journeys and correctly route calls to agents with the right skills.

This led to excessive transfers, wasting time for customers and agents. Cost to serve was further increased by high maintenance charges, time-consuming upgrades and additional infrastructure needed to connect the bot to the bank’s backend systems.

Every call was transferred out of Genesys Cloud and then returned, creating an outbound leg that skewed handling and reporting. Also, calls could only be tagged with no scope to extract information, severely limiting the self-service options that could be offered to customers.

“From start to finish for all our intent routing, it took us just four months to implement our Genesys Cloud voicebot,” said Noble-Beasley. “We’ve reduced intents from 1,358 to just 23, enabling customers to reach their desired destination faster. We’ve also seen generic-other intents drop from 27% to 12% — instilling confidence our fine-tuning efforts are on the right track, thanks to the Genesys Cloud advanced bot management tools.”

Other notable achievements include a three-point customer experience score improvement, a four-point increase in agent routing accuracy (leading to a 27% drop in transfers), and a three-point uptick in delivering quick decisions.

Digital experience aligned with brand values

Abandon rates, average speed of answer (ASA) and average handle time (AHT) have fallen by 28%, 49% and 19%, respectively. And the introduction of Genesys Cloud native routing has further optimised call handling processes, saving up to 60 seconds per call and money on toll-free charges.

“Genesys Cloud AI offers a much richer, personalised customer experience,” said Noble-Beasley. “For example, it provides personality to our voicebot that’s consistent with the Kiwibank brand. The system is so much easier to tune, understand and follow the customer journey. And we have much cleaner data and reports.”

Harnessing Genesys Cloud voicebot capabilities is set to substantially reduce IT infrastructure and support costs. Kiwibank no longer needs to keep, manage and update extra physical servers. Everything is now contained in the cloud with Genesys Cloud data actions and AWS Lambda connecting to backend systems, eliminating the need for additional middleware.

“The Genesys Cloud voicebot implementation ensures our customers are at the heart of conversations,” said Steve O’Shea, Head of Customer Engagement Hub – Northern at Kiwibank. “Not only are we enabling our people, but our customers feel valued and confident their finances and personal information are safe and secure — and that they’ve been understood and routed to the best person to manage their inquiry.”