Overview
The client provides a broad range of banking and other financial services, including business loans, loan insurance, mortgages, foreign exchange, correspondent banking, credit cards and stock brokerage. As a part of its offerings, the client provides self-service capabilities to handle their basic banking issues and transaction activities. As a result, the contact center agents have become the primary contact for customers. HCLTech helped transform the contact center user experience while mitigating risks.
The Challenge
An increased volume of customer requests
The bank has been facing challenges in handling the increased volume of customer requests, which is increasing abandonment rates and negatively impacting service and customer satisfaction due to longer call durations and increased hold times.
Additionally, bank advisors were unable to provide any real-time insights when customer contacted the center for any of the following queries:
- Updating PIN status
- Getting devices blocked in case of fraud
- Merging parent and child account details
This has negatively impacted the bank’s customer experience, consequently reducing the Customer Effort Score (CES) — a service metric that measures how much effort customers put in to interact with the business.
In case of any hardware failures, the eight critical services in the areas of account and PIN management are blocked due to:
- IT risk profile exceeding an acceptable limit
- Lack of a suitable backup solution
- Lack of SME knowledge required to upgrade or resolve any application issues
The Objective
Simplifying contact center user experience
HCLTech identified several important objectives that would validate the project’s success.
- Fulfill customer needs digitally with self-service capabilities supported by expert agents when digital service does not meet the customer's needs
- Seamless and consistent customer experience with like-to-like migration for critical functionality
- Provide a sustainable solution for agents to handle customer calls
- Reduce customer complaints, thereby improving customer retention
- Mitigate operational risks and reduce security concerns
- Improve IT risk profile with re-platforming and using simplified contact center technology
The Solution
Building a new front-end for contact center engagement
The solution focused on building a new front-end for the desktop application for critical banking services in the areas of account and PIN management. This acted as a foundation for the other services (Interactive Voice Response) to be built to host additional facilities over time to fully replace the legacy application. It helped the banking operations team use the re-platformed channels application to support customers with a simple and hassle-free process, where the agent can log in to the application and initiate a search for the account. After successful verification of the customer, the application now acts as a single stop for all customer queries.
To achieve a like-to-like migration of functionality from the legacy application to the re-platformed application, the latest technology stack was used, as highlighted below:
- React-based web application at the front-end
- Java Spring boot APIs as an orchestration layer between the front-end and Mule
- MuleSoft APIs acts as functional system adapters for mainframe
- IBM MQ as a middleware to deliver messages between Mule and mainframe
- Mainframe acts as a data layer with minor functional implementation
These components are deployed on strategic infrastructure to ensure they are maintainable and secure. The infrastructure components include:
- VMware for servers
- Red Hat Linux for OS
- Network Virtualization and Security Platform (NSX) for load balancing
- JBoss for hosting Spring boot APIs
- Hybrid Mule enterprise runtimes for hosting Mule APIs
- IBM Websphere MQ for integration layer
- IBM Mainframe for backend
Approximately 950 advisors are currently migrated to the pilot version of the application until the complete migration to production happens.
The Impact
Improved customer experience at the contact center
- With the deployment of application to a strategic infrastructure, the business has benefited from a more stable resilient and secure desktop solution. Both application and infrastructure would now be able to support any functional change/enhancements if required as well as the ability to meet regulatory requirements that arises.
- Provided the business access to a single portal with 360-degree view of all the banking facilities, including the ability to inquire about accounts and requests to restrict devices suspected of fraudulent activity.
- Enhanced the capacity of the contact center agents to handle the increased volume of customer requests, thereby reducing the abandonment rates(abandonment rate is a call center metric that records the percentage of calls ended by customers after joining a queue) and providing a quick turnaround.
