Customer
Piraeus Direct Services (PDS) is a subsidiary of Piraeus Bank, a leading multinational banking group headquartered in Athens, Greece. The Piraeus Bank group operates across South-East Europe, serving over 5 million customers. PDS functions as the contact center operation for Piraeus Bank, providing 24/7 customer support to clients of Piraeus Bank Greece and Piraeus Bank Cyprus. As a critical component of the bank’s customer service infrastructure, PDS is dedicated to delivering efficient and responsive service to its vast customer base.
Challenge
By early 2014, PDS faced challenges with its existing IVR system, which struggled to meet customer expectations and operational efficiency goals. The traditional IVR system was plagued by high abandonment rates, lengthy call handling times, and a low self-service completion rate. Customers frequently complained about the complexity of navigating the IVR, leading to dissatisfaction and increased reliance on human agents, which in turn drove up operational costs. The bank needed a more advanced, user-friendly solution to enhance customer experience and improve contact center efficiency.
Solution
In February 2014, PDS partnered with Omilia to deploy a state-of-the-art Natural Language Understanding (NLU) Speech Portal. This solution was designed to improve the efficiency of call processing and enhance customer satisfaction. Omilia’s solution was seamlessly integrated with PDS’s existing Genesys infrastructure, including Genesys Framework v7.6 and GVP v8.1. The platform’s compatibility with both the VoiceXML open standard and GVP’s proprietary functionality was particularly beneficial, ensuring a smooth transition and maximizing the capabilities of the existing system.
Results
The deployment of Omilia’s NLU Speech Portal brought about dramatic improvements in PDS’s contact center operations:
- IVR Abandonment Rate: The rate at which customers abandoned calls within the IVR system was reduced by 50%, demonstrating a substantial enhancement in customer engagement.
- IVR Handling Time: The time required to handle calls via the IVR system was also cut by 50%, leading to quicker resolution times and improved customer satisfaction.
- Self-Service Completion Rate: The completion rate for self-service interactions increased by 40%, indicating a significant improvement in the system’s usability and effectiveness.
- Customer Complaints: Complaints about the complexity of the traditional IVR system vanished, signaling a positive shift in customer perception and experience.
These improvements enabled PDS to handle twice the number of calls with the same resources, including the number of IVR ports and ASR licenses, while significantly reducing agent-related operating costs. The success of this deployment has reinforced PDS’s partnership with Omilia, which they now consider an indispensable and valued partner. PDS highly recommends Omilia’s solutions to any organization looking to enhance contact center operational efficiency.
“Although both PDS and Piraeus Bank senior management had reservations regarding the maturity of Speech/NLU technologies to provide quality service to our customers, we were very positively surprised to discover that Omilia’s NLU solution not only managed to provide an excellent Customer Experience, but also exceeded, by a large margin, our expectation regarding all KPI improvements.”
Vangelis Moustakas
Piraeus Bank Services General Manager
