“Discover is committed to responsible AI use with adequate rigorous risk management. Our collaboration sets a new standard for customer care in the financial services industry. With generative AI capabilities, our customer service agents are providing informed, proactive, and efficient support that builds lasting loyalty and increases productivity. We’re already seeing faster resolution times and expect customer service to continue to improve as the solution rolls out.”
Jeff Stone, Vice President Contact Center Solutions at Discover Financial Services
About Discover
Discover is a leading U.S. digital banking and payment services company. Known for its focus
on customer experience, Discover has consistently achieved top marks in customer service
industry rankings, such as JD Power and SQM, and is recognized for its innovation in contact
center and customer interaction technologies. Discover handles millions of calls annually and is
committed to enhancing both customer and agent experiences.
Business Challenges
Legacy IVR Limitations
By 2016, Discover’s interactive voice response (IVR) system was a mix of touch tone menus and directed dialogue speech menus, hosted through a third-party vendor. Despite high customer satisfaction scores, the system had no natural language understanding (NLU), limited flexibility to add or modify self-service options, and suffered from containment-related limitations.
Key pain points included:
- Difficulty increasing self-service automation due to rigid, menu-driven systems.
- High agent-to-agent transfer rates
- Not realizing the full set of opportunities to enhance the customer experience.
Solution
Migration to Conversational AI
Discover selected Omilia’s conversational AI platform following a rigorous evaluation and five-month pilot, competing against established vendors. The Discover team opted to first test the technology by deploying a pilot, with the initial deployment targeting a subset of inbound calls, controlling for test group exposure, and measured task completion improvements versus the legacy system.
The learnings gathered from the customer-facing production pilot:
- Technology highlights: NLU “How may I help you?” replaced menu-driven navigation, enabling callers to speak freely and access self-service features more intuitively.
- Deployment steps: Piloted the new Conversational AI system with targeted groups and several core self-services including checking balance, making payments and reviewing recent transactions.
Success criteria focused on improved containment and reduced early hangups. During the pilot, Omilia’s platform outperformed the existing IVR in key metrics with a containment improvement, demonstrating higher task completion and customer engagement.
Following the successful Pilot results, Discover migrated off their legacy IVR technology. This transformational customer experience (CX) project included the full migration of over 40 self-services from on-premise and modernizing the voice experience.
More recently, in response to a company-wide digital transformation mandate, Discover transitioned to Omilia’s exclusive single-tenant cloud (Omilia Cloud Platform®) in AWS, streamlining management and modernizing infrastructure. Integration involved working closely with existing managed service providers to minimize disruption to ongoing operations.
Results
Since implementation, Discover has continued to scale self-service automation and voice capabilities using Omilia’s solutions. Notable outcomes include:
- Customer impact: Improved self-service rates, reduced average handle time, and maintained high customer satisfaction scores and reduced agent-to-agent transfer rates.
- Flexibility: Omilia’s tools have allowed Discover’s team to develop new services independently, critical for ongoing automation and compliance with cost-management targets.
- Sustained impact: Discover continues to meet annual operational improvement targets using Omilia’s platform.
- Employee enhancement: With advanced conversational tools and improved workflows, agent turnover issues were managed and employees could focus on more valuable interactions.
“Omilia’s solution gave us the flexibility and performance needed to push past our containment plateau and stay true to our customer experience values. Their technology delivered—both on performance and on partnership.”
— Jason Phillips, Director, Product Management & Strategy, Discover
