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Jennifer Hewit
Head of Cognitive and Digital Services, Credit Suisse
Supernova Award Category:
Future of Work: Employee Experience
The Company:
Credit Suisse is a Swiss multinational investment bank and financial services company founded and based in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1856, Credit Suisse has operations in over 50 countries, with over 45,000 employees in 150 different nations. The company offers a range of advice and financial solutions, including structured advisory, wealth management solutions, various banking services, global securities sales, and investment research services. Credit Suisse offers its products and services to private, corporate, institutional, financial institutions, governments and retail clients.
The Problem:
In December 2016, when Jennifer began her current role, Credit Suisse’s Global IT Service Desk required a significant digital transformation to better service its internal end user-base. Employees who called in with IT issues were directed to support agents based in 3 locations, North Carolina, India, and Poland. There were significant inconsistencies with resolution protocol and ticket processing, resulting in slow response times and an increased frequency of human error. Callers from around the world had to wait in a queue for the next available agent, a process that suffered when demand increased. Employees waited on hold or on the phone with agents for simple tasks, such as password resets and computer reboots; time spent on the phone was time away from servicing the end-customer and generating revenue.
Credit Suisse wanted to transform its service desk and offer great user experience for employees beyond voice support, while improving efficiency and productivity. In addition, call center agents would be able to focus on higher level tasks, increasing their job satisfaction.
The Solution:
Credit Suisse expanded its channels for IT services, adding English text chat with IPsoft’s virtual agent, Amelia, to existing voice support. Amelia went live in December 2017. She handles the most common IT Service Desk queries 24/7/365, such as email issues, password resets, Wi-Fi troubleshooting, computer restarts. When Amelia is unable to handle a request, she escalates to a human. While the human solves the problem, she observes in the background, learns, and after review, adds this new process to her knowledge base. With time, Amelia will expand her capabilities and the number of languages she can speak. Credit Suisse prioritized humanizing Amelia so employees would interact with her. It invited employees to crowdsource her knowledge and framed Amelia as a support channel vs. an AI solution. Credit Suisse also brought specialists on board to build Amelia's "brain", including service desk experts, a neuroscientist and a linguist to optimize engagement.
The Results:
Amelia had to prove from the beginning that should could solve problems quicker and at the same skill level (or better) than her human counterparts. She has succeeded and Credit Suisse will utilize Amelia as the first line of support for the majority of users at the firm.
Amelia now services over 50,000 users in 40 countries globally, and 80 tech support agents have been reallocated to provide higher-level support. IT personnel are empowered to create impactful business value by focusing on higher-level tasks, relieving them of repetitive, low value work. As a result, the Credit Suisse IT Support team has welcomed Amelia on board.
Amelia is able to seamlessly integrate into a company’s existing backend technologies; in the case of Credit Suisse, Amelia integrated into their existing desktop applications, mobile engines and knowledge management systems.
A recent incident in EMEA resulted in 4,000 users losing access to an application; Amelia was able to do the work of 13 humans in 1 day, getting users back online quicker and more efficiently.
Metrics:
At the beginning, Amelia’s success at understanding user intent was around 23%. Credit Suisse made the decision to put Amelia in front of users early as they wanted to use real interactions and employees to train her. They didn’t want her language to replicate IT staff but rather create a new positive user experience. Within five months, Amelia’s intent recognition rose to 85%.
Amelia is now able to handle and resolve 20% of all IT requests, from routine L1 issues to more complex L3 incidents. Credit Suisse’s goal is to automate 25% of IT service desk queries by the end of 2018, with a medium-term goal of having Amelia handle 1/3 of all IT service desk requests.
The Technology:
IPsoft’s Amelia connects conversations to data and processes in order to provide a personalized service to every customer, at scale. Amelia’s unique skills set includes conversational intelligence, advanced analytics, smart workflow, experience management, and supervised automated learning. Amelia has emotional intelligence and can adjust her tone accordingly if a user is frustrated, angry, or irritated.
Disruptive Factor:
Credit Suisse is using AI to completely redesign and disrupt its IT service desk. The company believes that just as ATMs replaced human tellers for cash withdrawals in bank branches, Amelia will revolutionize and automate IT support, changing how employees solve problems, for the better.
It has deployed Amelia to increase efficiency of its support as well as to improve employee experience and efficiency. She ensures that employees gain a consistent, yet personalized, experience. Today she resolves queries faster at any time of day, anywhere in the world, supporting an increasing number of employees. Time employees save by quickly interacting with Amelia can be used to focus on their job and drive revenue for the bank.
The future will involve humans and technology working together to improve service and tackle ever more difficult problems. Credit Suisse decided to position themselves at the forefront of this digital revolution by utilizing IPsoft’s transformative technology to improve employee experience. The company believes that cognitive technologies have many applications throughout the organization.
Shining Moment:
A recent incident in EMEA resulted in 4,000 users losing access to an application; Amelia was able to do the work of 13 humans in 1 day, getting users back online quicker and more efficiently and allowing the voice queues to be opened for more complex tasks. Amelia resolved 67% of the incidents in that one day through automation and without the need for human intervention.