Banking is an industry built on customer trust. For CaixaBank, the leading financial group in retail banking in Spain, creating reliable and accessible digital channels for customers is a critical part of delivering a high standard of trust and compliance.
As its customer base grows, the bank saw a large increase in support requests, and needed to build a system that could effectively scale and route inquiries.
Prior to the project, CaixaBank had over ten teams managing various parts of its contact center services, and over 50 different customer support phone numbers. It knew that finding a way to unify its systems on a single platform would enhance both the customer and agent experience.
Consolidation
50+ service phone numbers condensed to 1 number
High processing capacity
IBM Watson responds to inquiries, providing over 2 million answers each month
CaixaBank first chose Salesforce as its new platform of choice due to Salesforce’s high potential to scale and innovate, and its multicloud approach that extends beyond the contact center. Building off its prior work with IBM Watson® technology, IBM® Consulting was the natural partner to work on this transformation because of both its Salesforce and IBM expertise.
User experience was an important building block for CaixaBank’s digital strategy. The transformation needed to accomplish three things: efficiently manage the contact center, unify customer service channels and unify their technology platform—all with a focus on improving user experience for customers and agents.
Through the Salesforce platform, CaixaBank now provides employees with the right tools and information to make the best recommendations and build customer relationships. The bank incorporated AI, including IBM Watson agent-facing chatbots to offset basic inquiries, escalate to live agents when appropriate and surface answers during customer interaction to reduce case time to resolution. To improve back-office productivity, automated workflow processes create consistent customer service journeys while reducing redundant workload for agents. For more straightforward requests, IBM Watson and machine learning with natural language processing enables support channels to provide nearly two million answers each month.
CaixaBank (link resides outside of ibm.com) is the leading financial group in Spain and one of the most significant in Portugal, where it controls 100% of Banco Português de Investimento (BPI). The bank, chaired by José Ignacio Goirigolzarri and directed by Gonzalo Gortázar, has 21 million customers in the Iberian market, and the largest commercial network on the peninsula. It has more than 6,100 branches and more than 15,000 ATMs, and is the industry leader in the digital banking sector with a percentage of digital customers of 70.6%. Technology and digitalization are key to CaixaBank’s business model, which has a digital client percentage of 70.6%.
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