CUSTOMER PROFILE
Brazil’s Banco PAN serves 20 million customers and handles one million monthly interactions across voice and digital channels in its distributed contact center. Imbalanced incentives for BPOs and an unreliable IVR infrastructure meant the bank was not fully focused on the customer journey. A realignment of goals and technology, including NiCE CXone and Quality Management, Interaction Analytics, and Workforce Management solutions has given Banco PAN a renewed focus on positive outcomes. Several core KPIs have shown significant improvement while operational costs have come down substantially.
01 THE BEFORE
Intents and outcomes out of alignment
Banco PAN relied on multiple BPOs to serve its 20 million customers but lacked a clear audit trail between service level goals and the attainment of each BPO. Each BPO used its own contact center infrastructure, quality, and workforce management systems.
An on-premise IVR was unreliable, with 92% average uptime. The external services manager responsible for the IVR was compensated primarily for client retention. This incentive led the vendor to make reaching a live agent difficult since a live contact could lead to attrition. Banco PAN itself could not customize the IVR and requests for technical improvements or enhancements took a matter of weeks for the vendor to process.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
A journey-focused re-evaluation
Facing IVR outages for several hours at a time and the recognition that self-service outcomes were underperforming expectations because of the incentive scheme, Banco PAN re-evaluated its contact center strategy. The review identified several areas for improvement in both self-service and live contact handling. Quality and customer sentiment were only measurable through manual reviews of small samples, and the siloed BPO relationships had limited flexibility. “Our scenario resulted in fragmented views of operational metrics and KPIs from our four different service providers, making it difficult to audit and understand the customer journey,” said Marcello Goldkorn, Banco PAN superintendent of customer support. “Even post-call surveys lacked credibility, since they were influenced by the agent inviting the customer to respond to questions.
03 THE SOLUTION
Designing a customer-first approach to banking
Banco PAN sought a technology overhaul that would match its ambitions to improve service quality and customer experience, support future growth, and deliver operational cost savings as well. The bank turned to NiCE for the CXone platform, along with Quality Management, Interaction Analytics, and Workforce Management solutions. The implementation, with a services layer provided by Mitel-Unify, included a deep dive into Banco PAN’s customer-facing operations to design a new user experience that could improve customer experience, CSAT, and first-call resolution rates.
The rollout spanned several phases over a seven-month period. An internal team developed a series of integrations and automations that make it easier for Banco PAN to introduce new self-service options and adjust them over time. NiCE CXone provides a unified platform for customer satisfaction surveys, screen recording, CRM integration, dashboards, reports, quality management, and interaction analytics.
Banco PAN has several alerts configured in Interaction Analytics, which provides full speech analysis of 100% of contacts. These alerts identify attrition risks, poor sentiment, unusually short calls, and other action items that can be immediately reviewed by contact center leadership. “Having every single call covered gives us more profound analysis and understanding of the issues that can come up over the course of the day, and the ability to retrain agents who are making mistakes or are limited by something they don’t know,” Goldkorn said.
The quality program now includes a gamification and rewards program for agents across the entire extended organization. The ability to intervene in real time means that Banco PAN can take much faster corrective action if a particular agent pool, skill, or product line is struggling. “We can check service levels and calls on a live basis to understand what’s going on and quickly identify things we could do better while still providing services to those clients,” said Tulio Prado, Banco PAN senior manager of customer support. “And our overall services strategy is now driven by our business objectives, not by vendors.”
04 THE RESULTS
Abundant improvement in customer outcomes and operational efficiencies
The full solution and revised approach to customer journeys and self-service have helped Banco PAN to rapid improvements in several KPIs. “NiCE has brought the data, dashboards, and insights to our organization that we need to identify areas of improvement and start acting on them,” Prado said.
The substantial improvements include:
- First-call resolution up 30%
- Operational costs down 20%, despite an overall 35% increase in contact volume as the bank grows and IVR features become more useful
- 30% of calls are now resolved in IVR self-service
- Average agent quality improved from 79 to 90 on a 100-point scale
- The share of on-time coaching (agents receiving feedback within 24 hours of a coachable issue) is up from 63.1% to 85.9%
Banco PAN can also identify operational issues affecting account holders more quickly and restore normal operating conditions with fewer delays. The bank can also coordinate among more BPO providers (currently five) and have them compete to serve the same line of business, instead of allocating fixed slices of the business to each. “NiCE CXone has helped us meet our primary goals: to provide better and faster answers to our clients and to quickly address problems when customers encounter difficulty with our services or their overall journey,” Goldkorn said. “Instead of needing days or weeks to identify and solve problems, we can coordinate the contact center, IT, and product teams to fix issues in a matter of hours.”
05 THE FUTURE
AI insights and full workforce management coordination
Banco PAN has started trials of AI-powered NiCE Quality Management Advanced and Enlighten AI. Data collection is now complete and the first trials of Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese-language bots are underway. A new enterprise CRM solution is the bank’s next major IT undertaking, and that solution will be integrated with NiCE CXone.
NiCE Workforce Management has been partially rolled out, and within one quarter the bank expects to have coverage with all agents at all five BPOs. This will enable Banco PAN to realize greater efficiencies through central WFM planning and accountability. “Today we tell them the volume curve to expect and they report their performance, but we’re not able to audit that in detail,” Prado said. “Taking ownership of all of the workforce management data will help us better understand those volume curves, and to better control call flow over the course of a day.”
