NAB has laid off 19 “email listeners” in eight of its business units since July last year and automatically tested tens of thousands of emails to improve customer service.
The bank is one of the first users in the world of IVA software (Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant), which is used as a bot that can read, forward and answer e-mails.
IVA is considered the “star” of the NAB Universal Workflow (NUW), which is essentially a framework of reusable components that units and teams from across the bank can use to digitize processes in order to improve customer service.
Pega IVA uses natural language processing (NLP) to pull the action item out of emails and then route it to the right place in the bank.
“I’m sure a lot of people [who] Work for medium and large companies is just as tied to email as we are. We are frankly busy with this stuff every day, ”said Jonathan Tanner, general manager of process automation at NAB.
“When we look at what our customer service and operations teams are doing, they spend a lot of time reading, interpreting, and testing emails from customers, bankers, and internal teams.
“We have bankers on site who receive a request in their email from a customer to forward it directly to a central mailbox, and then someone else has to read 15 levels into this email and try to find out what needs to be done actually happen.
“As you can imagine, it’s not an efficient process, but it’s not a great customer process either, as much of it is point-to-point communication, so things get lost and, increasingly, misinterpretation of what was asked. “
The bank has only been using IVA in production since July last year, but has already set up 19 “email listeners” in various parts of the institution.
Tanner said that not all parts of the bank that Universal Workflow touches would use an email assistant.
But he said those who had already seen “immensely impressive” results.
“We have received approximately 34,000 emails that have already been forwarded [IVA] and we get about an automatic classification rate of 75 percent, ”said Tanner.
“That’s 34,000 emails that used to have a human look at them, figure out how to find out what’s going on, call someone, and so on.
“In the first three months that the platform went live, we obviously made it easy for ourselves – we didn’t really want to push the boundaries too much.
“But in the last few months we have put together a lot of teams. We have put together two new teams [IVA] About a month ago in our dealer area within the commercial bank.
“They reply to around 3,000 emails a week. Our original premise was that with the models we had built we would get an automatic classification of around 40 percent on the first pass, but would literally get 70 percent within three weeks. It was really, really impressive. “
Tanner said the merchant area owned and was able to tweak the model used to classify the emails at will.
He pointed out that if they took advantage of the universal workflow, businesses and teams would likely do a lot of the development and deployment work in the future, and that NAB’s technology teams would have to be less and less involved.
Unpack the Universal Workflow
Universal Workflow is essentially about improving the efficiency with which NAB handles communications.
The work program aims to increase efficiency by 15 to 20 percent, reduce customer inquiries by 20 percent and, in general, create a happier customer base.
In an internal video, NAB described Universal Workflow as its “strategic digital business process system”.
“This user-friendly system helps you manage cases across the NAB group, makes your job faster, easier and easier, and offers an exceptional customer experience,” said the bank in its internal pitch for employees.
“NUW has some great features that make it easier for us to serve our customers. This includes consolidating all contact with customers so that you have all the information in one place.
“You can talk to a customer on the phone and record the details at the same time.”
NUW consists of a number of frameworks and reusable components that are hosted on AWS.
The idea is that teams looking to shake up internal processes and workflows can have a redesigned workflow that is “designed and built” in weeks.
“NUW allows us to be very consistent in how we both manage work internally within NAB,” said Tanner.
This consistency should drive a number of case management standards across the NAB, from case creation to performance reporting.
“It doesn’t matter if you are on a customer service team or on the group control team, you will be working on the same components and the same case structures so that we can be very efficient and effective that way we can manage the work in-house,” said Tanner.
One of the central goals of Universal Workflow is to get business users to create as much of what they need as possible.
“What is really important to us is that it has to be business configurable,” said Tanner.
“We want to increasingly turn people away from the code. We want people to think about the customer problem they want to solve, not how to code the latest algorithm to make this thing work better. “
Another goal is to be able to better examine how well NAB is doing in customer service.
“Something that we are currently developing and that will be available in the next few months is … another strategic coverage,” said Tanner.
“We’ll be able to do things like what-if analysis and trend analysis of work flowing through our company, and actually look at some of the trends, especially when it comes to customer service – where we meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to which we do not adhere to SLAs, and what can we do about them to improve the service for the entire customer. “
With the universal workflow, the bank can also move away from a “monolithic” view of case management.
“We can set SLAs at both the case and assignment level. So we don’t just limit ourselves to looking at cases in a very monolithic way. We can have federated cases where we can move the work forward [to multiple teams or people]”Said Tanner.
“We can take a single customer request, break it down into multiple tasks, achieve SLAs for those tasks, and then call them up again so the customer can get a full result for their requests.”
Find use cases
Tanner said NAB is using Demand Squads to go into the bank and capture possible use cases for Universal Workflow.
“The demand team goes in first – they are our scouts if you want – and do the initial scoping work,” he said.
Other use cases are passed on to the Universal Workflow team by the bank’s business process transformation team.
“They are often the ones who give us the opportunity as they begin to see it through some of their work,” he said.
As the Universal Workflow team has enabled more successful projects – they have done 60 projects since July last year and covered 210 unique business processes – they are getting more direct approaches to support.
“We are on the front lines in retail, commercial bank, our corporate and institutional bank, and demand is high,” said Tanner.
“To be honest, we can hardly keep up at the moment. We have people who want to make their way to our door every day and talk about how they can get on board and get involved.
“It’s a really nice problem, but a challenging problem.”
Not every use case brought to Tanner’s team was well suited for Universal Workflow – and Tanner stated that the bank is driving not badly fitting processes in NUW.
“We work outside of the Universal Workflow inside the bank,” he said. “There are times when we look at it and say, ‘You really need something different here. So we’re not going to talk to you, but we’re going to talk to you in a slightly different context. “
Tanner said some of the use cases that are emerging right now are in the area of the bank dealing with financial crime and know your client’s processes (KYC).
“One of the areas that we’ve been working very hard on is our KYC teams and our financial crime teams,” said Tanner.
“We will at some point manage pretty much anything that comes out of our financial crime detection systems on Pega as anything that needs to be managed on a case-by-case basis.”
On the KYC front in particular, Tanner said that each year the bank “needs to go through everyone who has dormant accounts or who have not been accessed for a while, and we need to review our records and make sure these people are up to date. If it doesn’t, we need to take certain remedial actions. “
Tanner said the process was “very manual” and involved a “very difficult sort of rummaging through cases”.
“They managed most of it outside of tables, SharePoint, as you call it,” he said. “We have now transferred that to Universal Workflow.”
Applications also appeared in the bank’s residential construction business.
“Obviously, responsible lending is an issue in the press these days. It’s really important, ”said Tanner.
“We are currently developing a platform where we can really use Universal Workflow as the basis for our verification teams to manage the work.
“We found that around 90 to 95 percent of the verification tests we currently do manually can actually be done by a bot, so that’s really very important to us.”
NAB said the Universal Workflow pipeline had over 50 opportunities in fiscal year 19 alone.
Tanner said NAB’s progress with the Universal Workflow has been “great” and “impressive” so far.
“But there is a massive one [change] Agenda ahead, ”he added. “We are very happy about it.”
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