Case Study: Banking and financial services

Natural language automation delivers 100% disclosure compliance for large financial company

HGS Agent X™ text-to-speech feature eliminates reading errors, improving experience of customers and employees

Overview

A multinational financial services corporation partners with HGS to handle hundreds of payment card inquiries and applications a day. On many calls, customers must listen to multiple disclosure statements in order to finalise cardholder agreements.

When the client recognised that it proved difficult for agents to perfectly read aloud the often several-minutes-long statements, HGS automated the process, leading to much lower job stress for the agents and much higher call satisfaction for the customers.

100%Accuracy in automated reading of disclosure statements

66%Reduction in overall sales compliance errors

49%Increase in performance incentive payouts

Client background

Since 2001, HGS has provided English voice care, retention, and sales for this global financial services client. Our partnership has grown both in size and scope over 20+ years, with a current team of 600+ HGS agents offering 24/7/365 operations from the U.S. and the Philippines.

Business challenge

For one of the lines of business, every card application requires that the customer listen to a series of disclosure statements and accept terms and conditions to move forward. Per the client’s legal requirements, these lengthy statements cannot be pre-recorded and must be read accurately in real time without any modification or rephrasing. If the agents misspeak or stumble over words, they must start over.

The calls are all monitored to check adherence, and noncompliance can lead to performance-related attrition—a high-stress condition for the agents. These compliance errors can also impact the client’s brand and can have severe consequences when noncompliant with applicable laws and regulations that are in place to product the customers and the company.

Agent reading risks

Compliance error
Longer call handle time
Poor customer experience
Agent frustration

Solution strategy

In order to reduce agent effort and compliance risks during these calls, HGS determined that the process of reading the disclosure statements should be automated. By leveraging a custom-built Smart Response feature within HGS’s cloud-based contact centre AI software Agent X, the copy could be read to customers by a text-to-speech bot clearly and without errors.

Based on call type, agents can determine which disclosure statements the customer must listen to and will paste those that apply into the Smart Response. The bot is conferenced in, and as it reads the disclosure statement, the words are highlighted live on screen so that the agent can easily follow along. Once the customer has heard the statements and has verbally agreed to any requirements, the agent can move forward with resolving the caller’s need.

How agents use text-to-speech to read disclosures

Answer the call

Assist customer; announce a disclosure statement must be read to continue

Copy and paste

Move disclosure statement from client’s system into Agent X Smart Response

Bring in the bot

Conference in text-to-speech bot to read with 100% accuracy and compliance

Press play

Follow highlighted words onscreen as bot reads to customer; pause if requested

Confirm and complete

Ask customer to agree or disagree; continue and complete request if customer agrees

Technical details

From a technical standpoint, the text-to-speech Smart Response is an attended (on-demand) bot. The setup is quick—it is typically fully functional within 3-5 weeks of understanding a client’s business requirements, including user acceptance testing and signoff. The bot works as plug-and-play, is integrated easily with any enterprise applications, is scalable, and requires minimum support and monitoring for orchestration and administration. Further details are as follows:

Agent verification through login credential
Custom-built, agent-friendly interface (customisable as per feedback)
Real time copy-and-paste functionality available for transferring text from any application
Agent has control options including play and pause
Upon text-to-speech conversion, real-time word guidance will highlight the words already spoken by the bot for the agent to view what is already covered and what remains to be read to the customer
End-to-end reporting at agent level and disclosure statement level
Agent call disposition to track and reporting disclosure abandon/disconnections
On-premise and cloud-based solution is hosted on HGS side; therefore no IT intervention is required from client
No storage of any information; security guaranteed

Results

This feature was piloted for this client in early January 2023. After handling 3,973 new card applications by the end of March, the client saw:

100% accuracy in disclosure statement reading

Essentially, the text-to-speech bot is attended automation. This Smart Response feature augments the live agent with both speed and accuracy during the reading of the disclosure statement, while reducing the likelihood for other inconsistencies during the rest of the interaction.

A 66% reduction in overall sales compliance errors

Many factors affect overall sales compliance during each interaction, some of which are unrelated to and not impacted by disclosure statements. However, both the client and agents were thrilled to find that after the text-to-speech feature took over the disclosure statements, the overall sales compliance error rate dropped from 11.76% in January to 4.00% in March:

A 49% increase in performance incentive payouts

Per the client’s incentive program, high-performing agents can earn bonuses in addition to their regular salary. Before implementing the text-to-speech bot, agents often missed the monthly incentive opportunities due to the difficulty of reading the disclosures perfectly. In just three months’ time, the bot helped raise the incentive payouts from 59% to 88%.

In addition, the agents said their jobs are now much easier with the automated assistance, contributing such sentiments as, “It is highly appreciated!” and “Love it! It’s a big help!”

~4K New card applications processed using text-to-speech assistance

66% Reduction in overall sales compliance errors

100% Reduction in disclosure statement misreads

49%Increase in performance incentive payouts

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