Creating a Great Member Experience in a Finance-First State: A Fireside Chat with Del-One FCU

Welcome, everyone.

Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar, creating a great member experience in a finance first state. This is a fireside chat with Del One Federal Credit Union, the largest credit union in Delaware. Delaware may be the second smallest state, but it certainly punches above its weight in financial services. Home to some of the largest financial institutions in the United States and a network of community banks and credit unions, today, we’ll discuss what it takes to deliver a member experience that stands out. My name is Chris Bechtel.

I’m the VP of marketing here at Interface AI. I’m happy to be your host today. Just a couple of quick housekeeping notes. Definitely stay tuned until the end of today’s webinar. We have both an exciting offer for you as well as a compelling demo so you can see exactly how our unique and innovative technology is delivering value to credit unions and banking organizations.

So definitely stick around to the end of the webinar. We will also have a quick q and a session. So if you have any questions, do feel free to type them into the chat. We will endeavor to get to as many of the questions as we can.

In addition, we also we, of course, were recording this webinar, so we will also send out a link so you can view the recording, share with your colleagues, internally, and hopefully, further some additional discussions and learning.

Additional quick update on so just so you know who is Interface AI. We have been established since twenty fifteen. We’ve had the privilege of powering exceptional member experiences just like the one at Dell One. We both share a commitment to enabling financial wellness.

It’s critical. And from almost ten years, we’ve been building conversational experiences for community based banking organizations and institutions.

And today, we’re trusted by more than one hundred financial institutions to power better banking experiences. That means sixteen million consumers, one point five million conversations every day, across voice, chat, and employee AI. We power more than sixty solutions, both member facing and employee facing, that help our customers start small with their most urgent use cases and grow the adoption over time. All of our solutions are powered by a single unified foundational AI brain. As an example, credit unions can start with AI powered phone banking, which you will see a demo of momentarily, so definitely stick around to see that. But when you are ready to add, say, employee facing AI, a Copilot, with the same AI brain, it will power the use and use of new use cases as well. So you can continuously expand your learning, increase the value of what you’re getting in your organization.

And as a result, you don’t have to just start from scratch. So these are all prebuilt. You can retain each AI solution and the knowledge as you grow to continuously provide, again, better member experiences.

So this diverse product suite allows us to meet you wherever you are in your journey with improving member experience, reducing operational friction, and overall taking advantage of what this technology can offer. So today, again, we’re gonna be talking about, the Delaware financial services market, how AI and your member experience strategy works, and lessons learned from building. Exciting, compelling. Again, everyone, stick around for those, exciting offers at the end of the webinar.

We’ll have a great offer. We encourage all of you to reach out and schedule a one to one demo, and we’re gonna offer something special for doing so. And definitely stick around for our demo quickly of voice AI. Now without further ado, I’d love to introduce, our esteemed partner, Del One Federal Credit Union, and Dan McCarthy, president and CEO.

Welcome, Dan. Thanks for joining us today.

Hey, Chris. Thank you very much.

Much.

Super pleased to have you here with us. I also have, of course, Horacio, who goes by h, who’s our director of member experience, as well as Danelle, who is the head of contact center at Del One. And the three of us, I am, grateful that you guys have, taken time out of your busy day serving members, delivering amazing experiences in the state of Delaware to join us to share your story and some of, you know, what you’ve been able to do, together.

So I guess, you know, first up is sorta, you know, help us sorta set the scene, I guess, Dan. You know, how do you feel, you know, in Delaware, obviously, being a banking state, big banking state, but you’re one of the the leader in a credit union. How do you feel like you stand out in front of the other institutions?

Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah. I appreciate that, Chris. Appreciate the question. So Del One, we’re the largest credit union in Delaware.

So we have a direct relationship with eighty four thousand members in our state, which only has about a million people. And when you add in family members, we’re close to a hundred and ten thousand. So we have a relationship with one out of every ten people in the state of Delaware. Every one of our teammates works in the state of Delaware, and we’re really proud of that.

And for the number of members we have, we’re only seven hundred million dollars in assets. So our biggest value proposition is to serve people where they are, that cliche, whether it’s online, it’s chat, and we’re still investing in our branch network.

Delaware is a state officially, but I would be in I’m from Philadelphia originally. Let me tell you, Delaware is just really one big city. You go two people separated or two degrees of separation. Everybody knows everybody.

They stay in the state of Delaware. Everybody is either, you either made it or you’re related. Generally, the state of Delaware, and those relationships mean a lot or dated, not just the made it part. So but everybody everybody gets the point.

So relationships are really important in the state where everybody knows each other, and we’re low income designated. So, we’re proud of who we are and proud to be the largest credit union in the state.

And so you really your mission. Right? Your mission is really to be the easiest place to work and do business with. Is that right?

Yeah. Our our official North Star is be the easiest place to work and do business. And we don’t say easiest financial institution to do business with. We say easiest place because we recognize that if we are not as easy as the obvious examples that we all know of the Amazons, People just move on to the next guy. So if you wanna know how easy you are to work with, you don’t really need to do a survey. You just need to see how well you’re doing financially. Because if you’re not doing well and you don’t have a lot of pull through or a lot of apps don’t get finished online, it’s just because you’re not easy.

And we we recognize that we weren’t always where we wanna be. We’re probably still not there, but that’s that’s our specific focus and, something that we all coalesce around as our singular mission.

Oh, fantastic. And that’s why Easy Breezy, which we’ll get into in a moment, Breezy is really part of the solutions that we’re talking about today to make things, like, easy for customers to reduce that friction, to continue to have a high quality member experiences.

So so this question up here, you know, this is for you, Haech. Right?

Who is a typical Del One member, and how do you cater to those different communities? And, again, maybe talk to us a little bit about, you know, from your POV there, Haech.

Yeah. So Dell One, we serve over eighty four thousand members. And the great thing is that those members are made up of all types of generations, you know, from those that primarily use our branches to those that maybe have never stood in one of our branches and operate online only.

And it could be viewed as challenging having those diverse segments. Especially for Del one, we have a pretty even spread of them all. But we work through this by really understanding that gone are the times of, like, traditional segmentation where you can bucket behaviors by generations. You know, we have older members that tend to expect the the same services as some of our younger members, And it makes it that much more important to constantly be listening to them and not making assumptions to try to meet them where they’re at.

Like, we had lunch Monday with one of our older members who was around, I think, seventy five years old and uses bill pay through online banking. Like, I thought that was a neat takeaway. It really helped to drive that a little bit more home for us that bill pay isn’t just limited to, you know, millennials or older or whatnot. So in addition to trying to meet them where they’re at, though, we were listening to them, but we also have to recognize that and this is to what kind of Dan shared, that our competition isn’t just other credit unions.

It’s Amazon, Apple, Google because they’re helping to really shape these behaviors with consumers, and then those consumers are going to their financial institutions expecting just that. I should be able to get my loan decision in minutes. I should be able to do this online, or even I should be able to just get my answer quickly.

That’s a really great point, h. I think that we all kind of forget about, right, is that all of our consumers are having all of these other experiences that are not just credit union related. There are other institutions and other entities they do business with that now they kind of have those same expectations that they point at us, Right? Why can’t I get immediate response twenty four hours a day? Right?

And why can’t I just get transferred immediately to a human if I want to as well? Right? Because you have both. So now, for your perspective, Danelle, obviously, you know, COVID nineteen, I think a lot of us have seen, you know, especially on in the, you know, contact center space. You know, we all saw a lot of increases. Right?

And COVID was definitely a catalyst to a lot of this consumer behavior change. And again, it did get a lot of folks, like, comfortable with self-service.

I guess, you know, Sher, why do you think the reasons why AI, you know, became a priority, at least from your perspective?

AI became a priority because it gives the member, the option to do it themselves.

We they don’t have to wait on a representative or, oh, you know, you call these big companies, like, oh, the wait time’s ten minutes. With AI, everything is on you. As as soon as you get in, put your information in, information is readily available, and it breaks down that that not communic that well, that breaks that that area of not communication. Right? It’s like, oh, you know what? Let me complain because I was on hold for ten minutes, and now I have to complain to the CEO because I didn’t get a representative.

It kinda breaks that up, and it’s it’s well deserved. I mean, everyone should get service immediately, I believe, and that’s very important to us to instill that.

And for you, you’ve seen, like so I guess I talked to us a little bit about your call center volume. Right? You it looks like your volume, right, has had steady increases pretty pretty steadily, and and yet now you’ve been able to automate a good percentage of them. So, I guess, Sano, talk to talk to us a little bit about, like, just sort of your how your volume has has increased and what you’ve been able to do to handle that.

So the volume has definitely increased.

Like, it almost like COVID hit a switch and turned up the call volume after shit hit. So everyone is home, you know, calling in, which we didn’t have to in turn, hire more representatives. But then we found out this, AI interface, which was a a great resolution where we’re able to put the AI as a forefront, handle the bigger problems. Well, not not the bigger problems. Excuse me. Let me reframe. Handle the quicker issues, the balance inquiries, the the money transfer, the transaction histories, so that we are able to have our representative take a deeper dive into bigger issues.

Right now, AI is taking anywhere from sixty to sixty five percent, automated automation for us, which is a great help. And this goes back to, you know, letting AI handle those quick inquiries while we, you know, take the deeper dive into the disputes and the bigger issues with our members.

And so that means now your staff, again, it’s like it’s not like we’re we’re we’re replacing staff, but your staff has been elevated. Right? So now they’re handling more complex queries. They’re giving members more attention, and members are getting their basic quickie issues handled automatically. Is that right?

Absolutely. That is absolutely correct. We’ve also adopted that we hadn’t done before as the work from home, with the representatives as well.

And also we’ve altered our, operation hours, to optimize, like, when we need representatives on the phone. It’s just given us an opportunity to move some some figures around and make some adjustments, to better serve our members.

Amazing. And I think just to embarrass repeating.

So, like, what percentage are you able to automate again at this point if you had We’re at sixty to sixty five percent at this present time.

Which is pretty amazing, and that that’s fantastic.

That’s fantastic. So then so so so everyone has a clear view of what we’re talking about. Often, it may be important for everyone to visualize.

Right? So we have both we and you call the assistant Breezy, and that is both a chat component and a voice component. Is that right? And we have essentially sort of two of our products. Like, so we we call our chat. We have smart discovery. So this is what we call free PIN, and then we have smart transactions as well, which we launched earlier this year, and then what we call, you know, our voice product.

I guess talk to us a little bit about, you know, twenty four seven availability. How has some of these, you know, helped you again?

How what’s been the initial reception to Breezy?

It’s been good.

Ultimately, we initiated with twenty intents for voice.

Like I said, out of the intents, the top three was check balances, transaction histories, and money transfers.

With chat, we’ve started off with forty nine intents.

And the top frequent intents will support, also check balances, and online banking inquiries for logins.

Trans I could say transaction wise, the the number one request was check balances, transfers, and loan payments as well.

Beautiful. And now I guess I wanna go back a little so because there’s a really inspirational story that comes from the naming of Breezy. So, Dan, you know, talk to us a little bit about sort of the the back us up to the the history here a little bit of how did Breezy kind of get started and why is he named that way, and, I think it’s a great story.

Yeah.

We could talk about it all day long because it means so much to us. So a long time board member, named Breezy Bryce Brown. So his his nickname was Breezy, had retired from our board, and Breezy was always the first one to remind you. He was the state auditor in our state, and he would always say, it’s our fiduciary responsibility to take care of our members, and that would be the end and beginning of every damn sentence he said to us. But we took it really serious, and it meant a lot. Breezy stepped down off the board a few years ago.

And when we started talking about what we’re gonna name Breezy and just fun, our chief information officer, who would not consider himself a marketer, sent me a text and said we should call it Breezy.

And it was like, man, that’s a great idea.

And we stuck with Breezy. Breezy, like I said, subsequently retired.

And, he had gone through some medical issues. Again, he was on our board for forty years. He had gone through some medical issues.

And, he was in a in a rehab center when we first launched Breezy on the phone. And him and his daughter, I mean, to establish relation with his daughter, he kept calling the AI to hear, hey. This is Breezy as he’s laying in his bed and then eventually a hospital bed. And, unfortunately, he passed away just a couple months ago. But in his obituary, it talked about Breezy, our virtual assistant.

And, it’s he’s near and dear to our heart because of the guy he was, but the fact that we get to talk about him every day really means a lot. And I would encourage all of our, fellow colleagues out there. If you do this, they come up with a name that means something because it just makes people take that much ownership and pride in the product because of who it represents and what it represents, which is ultimately our members and someone like Breezy who always made sure they were in the forefront.

Yeah. That’s amazing. I mean, that’s an amazing too to kind of tie, you know, again, this sort of artificial technology that does provide a a real human benefit because it saves our time and gets us access create a little human connection here. I think it’s super important because it’s like the adoption. I don’t know, do you guys feel that any of that has helped your members adopt?

You know, what what what would you feel has helped the members adopt the solution so easily to get you to sixty percent automation? Like, it having this name and and a human connection, do you think that’s part of it?

I think that’s part of it for some folks who knew Breezy, and he was very well known. I think the biggest thing we did, is our marketing team in conjunction with the implementation team when we gave members a heads up that Breezy was coming, And we laid out there what are some specific examples and use cases that you can use Breezy for. Because AI makes any sort of technology makes people nervous because they think, oh, you bastards are gonna lay off all the people, and you’re just looking to make more money. And it’s like, no.

No. Like, we kept all our staff. I know we’ll talk about that later. Then we’d be able to help them with deeper issues and then be able to say, hey.

Let me find out the driving directions to our Milford branch. Or ultimately, a post authentication. Hey. Let me find out my balance at two AM.

And helping people understand what the use case was really helped the adoption.

Yeah. I think that’s that is really well, a point because, and I just had this question. This is exactly, I think, critical because a lot of FI sort of struggle with, like, rolling this out and getting adoption. And I think helping people understand clearly, yeah, what are the use cases, what can they get out of it is super super valuable.

And so I guess, I think, Donnell, you you spoke to this a moment ago, like, you know, the the key intents. Right? And so this is like back like, obviously, Breezy needs to handle the most common queries that people are calling in for all the time. And talk to us a little bit through how you guys identified those top intents, and and how is Breezy helping you identify maybe new intents that kinda need to be created.

I don’t know. I was thinking about this the other day, about the intents, and I think that we had a we got a good start with the intents, rolling out a a good set of twenty intents initially, and that was just pretty much the the start off kit. And then we were able to build from there.

AI does a a great job of, actually providing information in the background. Right? That we can identify, okay. Well, this member wasn’t happy with this, and it was surveys and and things of that nature.

Why did this member hang up?

Pretty much the insights is is helping us build out more intents.

Where we can say, okay. We we missed it. We got a thousand doing this or five hundred doing this. Why is a thousand doing this and the five hundred isn’t doing this? So it just the the technology is helping us roll out, bed intents in the future, and also manage what we have and being able to critique what we have so that it’s it’s better for the the members’ experience in the future as well.

Fantastic. And just so for everyone who doesn’t know what an intent is, an intent is essentially a topic. Right? So an intent would be like what’s your location and all the ways to ask for that. Now, I guess the other question here is obviously you guys have live chat and we have we wanna be able to not have any kind of friction, that’s the other important component about us being, you know, Dell One being the easiest place to work and also the easiest to work with is that if you wanna speak to an agent, right, our technology allows you to immediately get routed through other live chat platforms, correct, and also through phone. So how does that I guess, talk to us a little bit about that, Danelle. Is is do members if they wanna talk to somebody, are they blocked to doing so?

No. Not blocked at all. They can live chat. They can call by phone if they would like.

If they decide to do live chat, Breezy does a great job with connecting with Glia. And it pretty much hands the initial contact from the member initially. So it’ll handle the quick inquiries. What’s my balance?

You know, can I do a transfer, things of that nature? At any time throughout the conversation, if the member needs a live agent, Glia will transfer the member over to a live agent, and then the live agent can then take the chat from there. Also, the great thing about the end of well, the in interface and Glia is that it actually provides a script. So the rep doesn’t have to start fresh with the member, you know, repeating questions.

They have the script, though, with no. But they talked about previously, so they can just carry on right into the engagement.

Fantastic. And just to clarify, so Verity listening is that Interface AI complements a bunch of other products very well. So, like, live chat. Again, many institutions have a live chat pro platform.

And again, makes it super easy to route to the right person in live chat. Same thing with our voice, routing through contact center solutions. It’s easy to route. We don’t wanna create friction.

We want our members. I know you guys have a member that calls in every day who wants to talk to an agent. She’s not blocked from doing that. Right?

So all all institutions out there, right, if you can still roll out AI and you can still let your members call an agent every day just because. Right? So alright. So next slide here.

How have you and I think this is to you, h. Like, if you you know, how have you approached sort of the conversational dynamic here?

Any thoughts around how you can talk to us about this?

Yeah. So I think what makes this possible is this kind of two pronged approach that we have where we’re constantly monitoring member feedback, and we’re able to to do that by sending our members a text message, whether they were able to speak to Breezy and Breezy took care of what they called in for or even if it gets routed to an agent. And we’re able to sift through these surveys and kinda get a temperature check on how Breezy is performing and recognize any opportunities for enhancing Breezy. And then the other prong there is when the member gets to the agent, the agent also will document, what the call was for.

And so when we take both of those, data sources and put them together, we’re able to have regular meetings as a team to review this feedback, and we really do pride ourselves in being able to respond quickly, really, like, aiming for those quick wins or any opportunity to just fix a problem right then and there. But that can’t be possible if we didn’t have a vendor partner like Interface AI that also prioritizes being able to move just as quickly when there’s a need to introduce a new intent or maybe revisit one that was already, established.

And it was important for us to kinda just take away from an experience of bringing in Interface AI is really understanding that AI itself is a learning software. And where maybe some businesses struggle, it’s how can you humanize the AI.

Breezy is one of those steps. When you recognize AI as this learning software and the way that you would coach a teammate to make improvements, you almost wanna do that same thing with AI, where it’s important to really guide that relationship by setting those clear objectives and using continuous feedback to help them improve. You would do that with your teammate. Hey. You know what? Breezy is another one of our teammates.

Oh, that’s amazing. And and so I think, like, as you guys have monitor all of this, you’ve seen some automation trends. Here’s the automation rates. Right? So you can kinda we’ve we’ve seen how that’s grown.

Now I guess, like, it I think it’s super critical, the learning component. Right? Because it’s never sort of set it and forget it. Right? That was sort of our old IVR systems where it was like, it just was set up and then it didn’t change for years, right? So now, like you said, you have the ability to kind of listen.

So I guess here’s the next evolution. We kinda touched on this a little bit, and this is back to you, Danelle. How how have you feel like the role of the agent has evolved? Right?

And again, I think Dan said it too. It’s not like we’re we’re not this isn’t like, oh, we now have automation. We can fire a bunch of people. Right?

Because we value the people, and they’re delivering great work. So I guess talk to us. How’s their role evolved? And, what’s their been response to to working with AI?

I think overall, we’ve been able to elevate, the role of our agents.

Initially, of course, you know, new technology comes in, and everyone’s like, oh my gosh. You know? Are we losing our jobs? Like, no.

No. No. COVID’s hit. Now AI’s hit. No one’s lost their job. So we just been able to, like I was saying before, because of, AI or Breezy, is is is been it’s it’s it’s been it’s allowed us to identify what we can do more, whether it may be using agents for doing, outreach, new member onboarding, you know, just, moving, agents in areas where we need assistance in different departments.

But, I mean, overall, it’s it’s it’s it’s been a great tool that, elevation has been possible, with this with this new tool.

And do you see that the role that the reason and maybe this is to you, Dan. It’s like, Do you see the agents kind of because, obviously, contact center is sort of a cost area, right, where typically it’s been more support driven rather than a revenue driver. But I guess, do you see that that’s that’s sort of as the role of the agent evolves? Do you see that operationally that that’s where the direction of this is headed in a way?

Yeah. I think the answer to that might be twofold. One is that our agents, Donnell has been the leader of our call center through, for the past four and a half years. We’ll try to avoid saying the c word because we’re all tired of talking about it, but Donnell’s been been a great leader.

So for four or five years, the team was never able to take a breath. So I just logged on to our call center queue. We actually have one teammate who’s in ready, which means they’re not actively on a call. Donnell didn’t see that for about three years straight.

So one is we’re able to treat our teammates with a little bit more love and respect, like in most jobs where you have some downtime so that when they get on a call to answer the the genesis of your question, they can really be, like, a real like, this isn’t, like, BS. Like, a real partner with members and trying to help them and then uncover other potential lending or deposit needs that have a direct positive financial impact for the credit unions that we can then get back to our members. And, Donnell’s team has always been the leader in being able to get, loan applications.

So now his teammates have a chance to have in-depth conversation with members. Be able to get that. We build trust. Hey. They wanna do more business with us. When it comes down to it, we have to run this business like a for profit business to be able to generate the return we need, and we can do that now for a little bit less pressure because of Breezy deflecting a lot of those, easier calls, for lack of a better term.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And so then, I guess, like, how then do you feel again, we talked about this a little bit, but how how how have the members reacted to this. Right?

Yeah. What what’s been the general response if you guys can talk through that a little bit? Maybe you, Dan.

Yeah. So I would say there’s gonna be people so if you look at I hope everyone reads their survey responses. Donnell, HNI read every breezy survey response. And I probably say forty to fifty percent are like, oh, that’s cool.

It was easy. Thank you. Another ten or twenty are like, yeah. I’m figuring it out.

And then thirty percent are like, hate it. You you forgot about people. You’re terrible. I’ll just go to Chase or b of a.

And the point is we’re still there for those folks. So you need to create a little bit of friction, a little bit of intentional friction, just a little bit to try to get people to use it. And then on those other folks, we’ve continued to reinforce our message. We’re here.

We don’t wanna tell them that. All you have to do is say agent to get a person, but the truth is our agents will tell them that. Our our teammates say, hey. Just say agent, you’ll come right to me.

I also think it’s really cool that, the AI software can pick up the tenor of a member’s voice, And if they’re agitated, just push them right through. In all, I think our members think it’s cool, but people who are skeptical and hate Comcast and technology and just wanna complain, like, they’re gonna push back some of those folks. And we’ve said to them, hey. It’s cool because your favorite call center agent, Tara, is still there.

You say agent, you get right to her.

So you so if you expect a hundred percent, acceptance, and I love this, you’re living in the dream world. But for the folks that love it, we actually get more phone calls now than we ever have. And the amount of people that are doing transactions between six well, I’ll even pick it a more narrow window between ten PM and five AM local time is very unusual. I don’t understand why they wanna call us to do this or why they wanna log on at three AM to transfer money, but it’s cool. And we’re here for them now.

And it’s not just through online banking. It’s through some other channels where they can do more creative services.

Oh, fantastic.

I I mean, that’s super impressive. And so I guess then, what advice then, Dan, would you have for someone, you know, starting out. Right? So they’re kind of sitting here. How can we achieve what you guys have been able to achieve with a with a very healthy balance, right, of of automation, but also very high quality member support. How how would what advice would you have?

Yeah. So the first thing I would say to all of my colleagues out there is, one, you gotta take some time to educate your board and demystify this AI thing. Just try to explain a little bit more of what it is, and I appreciated that we had the interface team come to a couple board meetings. One to just do a little bit of education and another one to do a demo and talk through it as we got further through the sales cycle to get the board comfortable. But to remind them, you know, the epitome of what a credit union is with being service first, that’s not being lost. This is just another way to do it. It’s not like we’re doing this, so we’re no longer gonna be there in person.

And, the next piece is if you’re really serious about it, I I obviously, we think Hive interface or they wouldn’t be silly enough to have us silly silly enough to have us on the call, but I think they do a good job. But Novus, no matter how good interface is, it takes work. You are I really like what h said. You’re gonna treat your Breezy like a teammate. And we had a team that worked really hard to get implementation up and running. Interface was awesome.

But then, no, you’re gonna need people like h and Donnell to handhold this to get it better and better and better. You look at stats. What’s the reason people’s call? In DNA, we have these things, where we track the reason for every call, and you wanna be able to pull those stats. So don’t just think you’re gonna stick it in there and it’s good now because that’s not the reality of it.

But put in the time and effort, educate yourself, educate your board, and I think long term, it can yield results.

Fantastic. And how about from like, from a sort of a, you know, a member experience kind of POV? What would you recommend others sort of sitting there in your in your shoes kind of considering this? What what lessons learned do you have and recommendations would you have for them?

Yeah. So never losing touch of what the member is feeling or what they’re experiencing is key here when rolling out, a platform like this. And, previously, we didn’t have a real time way of getting feedback from members calling into the contact center.

We would have to set a certain cadence whether it was, you know, biweekly or monthly that a member would get a survey. But those weren’t really that effective because if it was two weeks after I called in, am I gonna remember the interaction?

What I really appreciated about this relationship with Interface is that there wasn’t an out of the box solution for triggering surveys with our members, but they were willing to hear us out on why we needed it and be able to make it happen. Like, we worked together. I think it would it took a couple meetings, having some ideas thrown back and forth, and then, boom, we were able to have members start receiving surveys in real time. And that was so key for us in recognizing what was important to the member. That way, we can take those and prioritize the enhancements that we were trying to make through the Breezy intent. So making sure you have that mechanism for feedback, I think, is very important here.

Oh, fantastic. And now how about lastly to you, Donnell, like, from your point of view in in implementing this, like, I guess, you know, those out there going, wow. How can I get to sixty percent automation and still keep my members happy? Any recommendations there for those that are wanna embark on that similar journey?

My biggest recommendation would be to, set us set aside time for user acceptance testing, because when you think you, tested and you haven’t tested as much as you thought you tested, like and and within your department, like, set aside extra extra time is very, very important, because, you know, running the department, you have to get your your your basic, you know, stuff done. Just you you still have to satisfy members, and then also you have to test on top of that. So just, you know, managing time management is an understatement when it comes to, deploying a service like this.

Yeah. But it sounds like you are effectively now maybe you’re a superstar, which is why you’re there with Dan. But it’s like you were able to handle that high call volume that we talked about before where you had no break and you so how did you, like so it seems like luckily, it wasn’t too heavy a lift on the interface side. You were able to do both, but still, like, how do you how do you balance getting all that done?

I just really had a great team, to be honest.

I had just a great support team. Dan was there with me. H was there when I needed help. And also internally, my direct reports, they were available.

They were, you know, anything I needed, they were willing to do, even come in on days that they, you know, didn’t work. You know? So it was just it just kinda worked out. I was kinda lucky, I could say, to to have a staff that, you know, that would, you know, do go the extra mile to ensure that this, this interface is being tested properly.

And then we need more testing after that. So it’s, you know, it is the support team I had pretty much.

Nice. And at first, they were a little, like, hesitant. Right? And but now they they love Breezy, I’m assuming, because they are able to, you know, again, have better member conversations and not answer the same question over and over.

Right? Tell us just a little bit. How how did what’s their perception been? Yeah.

Well well, absolutely. You know, being in the context in an environment, like, you know, you come in, you sit down, you get on the phones, and you answer questions all day. Right? And it kind of becomes like, almost like you’re a robot. You ask the same balance question just doing the transfers, like I can do some eyes closed.

But when Breezy rolls out and be able to deep dive into okay, what’s the concern? Can we get you alone? Do you need a loan? What’s going on with you today?

Just have those intimate conversations where we’re not worrying about average hamletime. Is this about servicing the member? That changes, the division for a representative. Like, I mean something to the company, you know, it’s like, I’m just not a service taker at this point.

I’m actually helping my community. I’m helping out members, and it’s a learning experience all around for everyone, when when it when it rolls out and pans out that way as well.

Oh, that’s interesting. I think that’s super interesting insight. Right? It’s actually implementing AI has actually allowed the member support team to actually provide more human time when necessary.

Right?

That’s lovely. Yeah.

So that’s great. Well, terrific. Alright. Thank you guys so much, and everyone just stick around.

Again, all we have a a good, promo coming up, and I wanna kick off a quick demo. I’m gonna bring on my colleague, Talib Khatib. Welcome, Talib. Thanks for joining us.

We wanna show y’all a quick demo so you can kind of get a visual and an audio sense of what we’ve been talking about today, to help clarify everything. So, thanks for joining us, Talib.

Thank you, Chris. So, yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and demonstrate our AI powered phone banking solution.

What you’re gonna get with this solution is that it will pick up one hundred percent of the incoming calls, completely eliminating your wait times and significantly reducing your abandonment rates. It’s going to be available twenty four seven, three sixty five, so you never have to worry about overflow solutions or after hour solutions. And, it’s able to automate, as in the case with Dell One, over sixty percent of the, experiences of your members. So I’m gonna go ahead and call Jessica, our demo ball, and interact with her.

Hi there.

Welcome to the interface’s AI powered phone banking. I am Jessica. Our conversation here will be recorded to help me get better. How can I help you today?

Hi, Jessica. I’m out driving around, and I need to make a deposit. Are the branches open?

Yes. We are open. Our Main Street branch only has drive through capability today. Do you want me to send you driving directions to the nearest branch?

Yes. That would be great.

Great. Please provide me the ZIP code or city name.

I’m in Brooklyn, New York.

Thanks. Looks like there are a few branches that are open in your location.

The branches are open from nine AM to five PM, Monday to Friday, and ten AM to two PM on Saturday.

I just sent you a text with driving directions, and you can always talk to me whenever you need help. I am available twenty four by seven. Is there anything else I can help you with?

I just started a new business, and it’s not going well. I don’t think I’m gonna make payroll. Can you help me skip a loan payment?

I can surely help you with skipping a payment. I have sent you a text with the link to the application to skip a payment along with the instructions.

Please click on the link and follow the instructions.

Please note that the application should be filled at least five days before the payment due date. To assist small businesses like yours, we have removed the thirty five dollar fee associated with skipping a payment. Do you wanna know which loans are eligible to skip a payment?

No. Can you tell me the balance of my checking account?

Sure. I will help you with your balance.

I see that you already have registered for voice verification.

Would you like to verify using your voice?

Yes. Let’s verify using my voice.

Great. Make sure there is no background noise and go ahead and say, my voice is my password. Please verify me.

My voice is my password. Please verify me.

Thank you. We are able to successfully verify that you are a customer of Interface Bank. The balance in your checking account ending with two two three four is two thousand three hundred and thirty seven dollars and fifty five cents.

Also, I wanna remind you that if you maintain a minimum balance of three thousand dollars, you will be eligible for an additional one percent cashback. Do you wanna know the balance of your savings account?

No. But I’m actually traveling to London soon. Can you help me put a travel notice on my account? I mean, on my card.

I can help you set a travel notice. I’ve noted that you’re traveling, and I have successfully set a travel notice on your card. We’ll make sure your transactions run smoothly. By the way, you’re traveling a lot, and I recommend you switch to our new credit card with no foreign transaction fee and many more benefits. Do you wanna know more?

No. That’s okay. But my wife just bought a car, and I’m looking for some insurance. Can you help me with car insurance?

Sure. Happy to do that. Give me a moment. I will transfer the call to our specialist, John.

So that was Jessica. Chris, back to you.

Thanks, Talib.

That’s terrific. So, again, you can get a quick, example of how responsive, IVR and actually voice because this is not your IVR. This is voice AI, which can learn continuously, be updated with new intents, and will not drop a call. So, obviously, we’ve, appreciate everybody sticking around. We got a couple of, bunch of questions here. We’ll endeavor to get to as a few of them at least before the end of our time.

I’d also encourage all of you to take advantage. So if any of you are interested to learn more, we definitely encourage you to schedule a one to one demo. And for that, the first five registrants, we have a promo. We can license our device biometrics.

So that’s one of the unique ways. We’re the only company that is doing this now to actually secure those channels, to prevent any kind of anti spoofing or anything that can, get around any of those biometrics. So this is a very robust security, so we’d encourage all of you to reach out. You can send an email to laura at interface dot a I to schedule a demo.

But a couple of questions here.

So so far, I guess, I’ll I’ll I’ll drive this to you first up, Dan. Like, how you know, and you talked to us a little bit about this, and this is how easy was it, like because we had to integrate with some other systems.

Right? Like, we talked about your live chat, and what was your recollection on how easy that that went down?

Yeah. So, we went live in a couple different tranches.

We initially went live with the, smart smart discovery.

So online, just being able to ask questions on the chat. So then we are able so we work through that process. Then we went live with the phone being able to call in to ask questions.

When I say ask questions, I mean preauthentication questions. Like, what is the what’s the directions to the nearest branch type thing? Then we went live on the phone with that as well. Then we went live at the same time with the authenticated phone and chat being be able to move money and do things that were tied to someone’s account.

The, you know, the process probably took hundred and twenty, hundred and fifty days, but that cadence that it worked through, and I’m proud. And Donnell said something that made me smile. We got feedback from Interface that we did more UAT than any other financial institution Interface ever worked with. So we took the testing really serious.

And And what I appreciated is interface moved as quick as we did, getting back with, some of the, all the intent type information where we had to say, hey. Here’s the answer to those twenty most frequent questions. So, the process probably took about four or five months, but it was once we get up and running with one, then you’re able to kinda get it flowing. And when you think about being able to get four or five months to get something up and running, probably takes six months to get an employee up and running.

So something like this, it it takes effort, but we were also really cautious to do it the right way. And I appreciate how Don and his team made the time because without the UAT, the process just it just never works. So Yeah. Absolutely.

That that that was about how long it took. We used DNA as our core just for everyone’s reference. So, obviously, the two systems have to tie together.

Yeah. And so, again, I think the question, that everyone wants to know is that it was easy to integrate because the interface has prebuilt connections to the core and to live chat platforms and its other contact center. So I guess from you guys’ perspective, Donnell and H, was it fairly easy? Like, obviously, there was the time to roll out all of those different products, but I guess the integration part, was that that go seamlessly, fairly easily from your your standpoints?

I’ll just say, I I’ll defer to Don because during the actual implementation part, I took a little bit of a a break here.

Gotcha. And how about oh, yeah. That’s right. And how about you, Don? Yeah. So so what was your POV, or what was your experience on how easy it was to kind of integrate with the very you know, with your core and with your live chat platform and that kind of stuff? How how easy was that to make happen?

Oh, it was super easy. It was just a matter of, getting, the right connections, like, back office stuff. We was like, you know, we need this. We need telling you guys we need this.

We need that. And you guys are spot on getting it done. It was it was no heavy or big complications of getting anything integrated. So I from my perspective, it was it was a smooth process.

I didn’t have to do any extra testing or anything like that, so I was very happy about that. So, yeah, it was it ran it went it went through smoothly.

Excellent. Alright. Now here’s another question for you, Don, since I got you. What we talked a little bit about this, but what happens after hours now? Right? So if somebody calls in, what and, you know, and Dan talked about it too, like, the volume of people calling in, like, between ten PM and four AM local time. So what’s happening now now that you have Breezy, what’s happening during after hours?

So Breezy, happily has been taken, taking the calls twenty four seven.

Which is like it’s it’s, like, overwhelming. But it’s it’s it’s been taking the calls twenty four seven. It’s wonderful.

We do have an option, though. Like, if the the member wants to talk to a lab agent, they can put in a callback request, and my management staff is on it in the morning, call the member back, you know, to adjust your concerns.

So, yeah, this is it’s awesome. This is awesome having that support twenty four seven.

Fantastic. And so that probably works fairly well. So they just make a callback request and, like, I I mean and and then you guys get back to the member, like, very quickly, I’m guessing, based on that.

Correct? That’s correct. The yeah. In the process is we get an email saying, hey. You know, this is a telephone number. This is what they inquire about. Give them a callback and, you know, be follow-up immediately.

Fantastic. And now, like, how do you think that you have achieved such high automation rates, like, early? Like, what do you think again, maybe it’s back to, like, what Dan was talking about and just how much you marketed to the members, the value, and the use like, how they could use it. I guess, like, from your experience to know, like, what do you think how did you achieve these automation rates? What do you what do you think it what was the key elements to get there?

I think it was a combination of it all. The marketing, also, like I said earlier, rolling out those intents. The the intents that we had in the beginning was a kind of starter kit, on what we needed to do. And and then it gave us an opportunity to go back to those intents and say, okay. Here here are the opportunities so that we can build those on on those intents. So I think that, that actually helped.

So yeah. So, we are looking, of course, to build more in the future, but I think that was a catalyst to get us there.

Beautiful. Well, hey. I really appreciate everybody’s time. A final question here to you, Dan. Like, where what’s next?

Where do you see, you know, where do you see Dell One going? You know, how do we make it even more the easiest place to work and do business with? Where do you see things going from here?

Yeah. So some of the other modules interface has, we plan on being able to explore from an automation standpoint.

But in terms of the partnership, H and Don are on the are on a call weekly still with the Interface staff, and we we launched kind of full Monty back in January every week. So we’re doing new intents monthly to try to keep getting the automation rate higher and higher. And even if it doesn’t get much higher, but there’s more things we can do quicker so that we can handle a higher volume of calls that should get through to the call center. But it is around a process of just keep building, building, building, and not just say, hey.

We’re at sixty percent. We’re good. And interface is being a great kinda guiding light through that process, and then we’re able to utilize our own data to identify from, internally, hey. These are the things we can still be able to do that you don’t need a human as long as we can work with the interface and be able to program it.

And Don and H talked about it. Probably our our biggest thing we can say about interface is the ability to receive feedback. Hey. This thing’s not working well.

Can we tweak this? And how quick the team responds.

Super appreciated. And you guys truly do like sounds cliche, but you actually act like a partner, not like a vendor, and it, certainly means a lot to us and very much appreciate it.

Likewise. I really again, I appreciate your time today. Thank you guys for taking your busy time out of your day serving members and making Del One, what it is today. Appreciate it. And I hope Breezy’s up there, looking down on us and, happy what we’re all doing and the legacy that he left behind. So, again, thanks everybody for joining. Look out for a link to review this recording.

Definitely take advantage of our, offer here. Reach out to Laura for a deeper dive, demo. We look forward to showing you how Interface can do the same that we’ve done with Dell one and look forward to partnering with you in the future. Thanks, everybody, for joining. Thanks, guys. Have a great day.