Merrill Lynch has seen rise in self-service rates by 62%, saving it millions in contact center costs annually
Johny calls a Wealth Management firm. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is in place to help him. However, he is not able to find the resolution through IVR. Many customers, such as Johny, find IVR to be quite cumbersome. Johnny then connects to a customer care executive to get his query addressed. Owing to instances such as this, the call volume increases exponentially escalating the costs.
A case in point here is Merrill Lynch, which is the wealth management division of Bank of America. The firm is headquartered in New York City with global offices all over the world including India. Merrill Lynch employs over 15,000 financial advisors and manages $2.2 trillion in client assets. The annual call volume at the firm is 30 million per year. One of its goals is to deliver a differentiated customer experience in the phone channel.
Self-Service Caller Experience
Merrill Lynch’s phone channel supports customer service inquiries across its retail and retirement portfolios. To reduce costs and improve the caller experience, Merrill Lynch needed to improve self-service resolution in the phone channel and enable customers to more effectively escalate a call from the IVR to the right agent if needed. The firm found out that accent or language barriers are causing a dissatisfaction amongst the customers.
With an aim to deliver white glove service, Merrill Lynch deployed [24]7 Inc’s natural language speech solution across its retail (wealth management), Merrill Edge, and retirement (RBCC) financial products’ inquiry lines. The speech solution understands natural spoken queries in both English and Spanish so customers can have more natural dialog with the IVR to navigate menus and conduct transactions easier. The [24]7 Inc ’s natural language technology is enhanced by deep neural networks (DNN) that draw from over 10 billion utterances to make speech recognition more accurate.
A key facet of the deployment is that instead of reacting to customer behavior, the [24]7 Inc natural language engine quickly determines the customer’s intent, and then determines the next best action for the customer.
The [24]7 Inc Speech platform handles over 30 million calls a year. Merrill Lynch has seen rise in self-service rates by 62%, saving it millions in contact center costs annually. In addition, call routing accuracy has improved substantially resulting in an uptick in customer satisfaction.
