African Bank Becomes #1 in Customer Sat and Gets to “All Agents, All Calls” with eGain Knowledge and AI

Company

The company is a leading multinational financial services provider. It offers personal and business banking, credit cards, corporate and investment banking, and wealth and investment management products. The bank employs about 50,000 people in Africa.

Challenge

The organization’s strategic mission was to become the “go-to” bank in the country, a bank that individual and corporate consumers would consider their first and obvious choice. The leading consumer survey had placed it at third and fourth place, after other major players, in the last couple of years. It wasn’t going to be easy. From the outside, the bank was facing competition from new, agile startups and FinTech disruptors. Internally, there was an ambitious expansion plan on the table, but the bank’s customer service process had become a complex web of phone and email contact points with hundreds of complex processes and a dozen legacy systems. Inevitably, the customer service experience suffered. Its Head of Customer Service Center, says, “We’d put all the complexity back out there for the customer. For this, phone here, and for this, email here, and clients didn’t know where to go.”

Solution

The company chose eGain Knowledge Hub™ as the enabler. It knew of eGain’s expertise in the sector and how it had enabled others, including its parent organization, to reinvent customer service. eGain had also proven its capability in ensuring security and knowledge-compliance in a sensitive sector.

With eGain’s omnichannel knowledge management technology, patented Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine for search and process guidance, and best practices-embedded solutions, the parent organization had increased First Call Resolution (FCR) to 95%, decreased Average Handle Time (AHT) by 67%, reduced agent training time from 10 weeks to 4, and improved customer satisfaction.

The bank’s customer service organization went through a “transformation,” literally. Its location was changed which led to mass attrition, and new staff had to be quickly trained. But the eGain implementation was completed on time. eGain’s content management capability made capturing the knowledge of the outgoing staff easy, and multimodal access to that centralized knowledge base (KB) made the new agents as good as the old ones, in half the time! The company had an All Agents, All Calls target explained by the Head of Customer Service Center as, “If it comes in, it’s yours. If you touch it, you own it. Do it right first time, do it quickly. And make it easy for the customer.”

Results

Less than a year after the implementation, the bank stands at #1 in consumer surveys! It tops in desk availability, knowledge of its staff, and most importantly, in overall service delivery. Moreover, the company had to be “doubly” compliant in a regulations-heavy sector, required to conform to both African regulations and those of the region where its parent company is based. The service organization found itself on an infinite training treadmill with agents having to be constantly pulled off the frontline for updates. These changes also created version control issues and led to inconsistent knowledge silos across the organization. The result was high effort both for the customer and the organization.

Customer service staff scaled from 80 to 600 with less than 1% churn. Agent training time reduced by half

Agents, even managers, found themselves busy with nothing to show for it, while key customer sat metrics sagged. Furthermore, 80% of the service center staff was brand new with many belonging to the “iPad look-up generation.” These agents were struggling even more. If the bank wanted to become the go-to bank of its region—a corporate and strategic aim—it knew it had to transform its customer engagement strategy. So it set itself one overarching goal: To become the #1 financial institution for customer satisfaction
in 18 months, while rapidly expanding across 11 countries in less than a year.

Customer service processes were streamlined, resulting in reduced customer effort.

  • 27 contact points for agent-assisted service were merged into two.
  • IVR options were simplified and dead-ends eliminated.
  • 525 customer service processes were reduced to 250.

AI-driven process guidance has taken the complexity out for the bank’s agents.

  • All agents are able to handle all calls.
  • New staff were empowered with the expertise of the best agents.
  • Customer service staff scaled from 80 to 600 with churn of less than 1%.
  • Agent training time was reduced by half.
  • Inconsistent and fragmented knowledge silos were consolidated to consistent, omnichannel knowledge.

In the pipeline is a rollout to 11 other countries in Africa. Knowledge will also be served for direct customer consumption through self-service. The company is confident that with eGain “transformation” is an easy word.

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