PostFinance: The road to conversational maturity with a long-term Unblu customer

By Matthieu Clermont Product Marketing Manager at Unblu

PostFinance, which is owned by the Swiss government, is among the largest retail financial institutions in Switzerland and a leader in payment transactions. With an employee base of around 3,655 people, they serve a total of over 2.5 million customers.

At Unblu, our collaboration with PostFinance began in 2016, kicking off with the introduction of embedded Co-Browsing to support the e-banking service capabilities. The success of this project led to the relationship growing and flourishing over time.

Today, we continue to work with PostFinance to ensure their customers get access to the highest quality service support available. This has included everything from replacing the emailing system with a more secure alternative to implementing Video & Voice, and beyond.

The main collaboration goals

PostFinance began the collaboration with a number of goals in mind that were broken into various phases in their work with us at Unblu. Firstly, they needed to introduce new channels to better serve and advise clients, while reducing the number of requests that came through traditional ones like contact telephone lines.

Next, the team at PostFinance recognised the mounting risk of email, with a legacy system that needed to either be updated or replaced with an alternative. This is a particularly important move as a reported 94% of organizations have fallen for email phishing scams at one point or another.

Finally, PostFinance wanted to embrace the ever-growing popularity of mobile banking by enhancing the experience of digital journeys on mobile devices and offering greater access to support.

First contact: Embedded Co-Browsing and chat channels

The initial stage of the collaboration began with PostFinance’s goal of deflecting the high number of phone calls and providing alternative support channels – which is a common challenge in contact center scenarios.

Overcoming this involved implementing a Live Chat channel that allows agents to field multiple conversations at the same time from the public website, in combination with the PostFinance Chatbot. This was further enhanced by the introduction of embedded Co-Browsing, enabling the agents to escalate calls even in the authenticated ebanking environment.

As a more secure, highly collaborative alternative to screen sharing, Co-Browsing empowers agents to guide customers to a swift resolution of their issue.

Phasing out emailing – and finding an alternative

With PostFinance, the specific issue at hand was the siloed nature of the email system, with agents having to rely on that single channel to see all incoming inquiries. To overcome this, Unblu worked side by side with PostFinance and other key technology providers to ensure that all incoming inquiries, whether via email or an Unblu channel, would come to a single inbox for easy handling.

This meant that all inbound client facing teams were merged into a single system, allowing them to turn off the legacy emailing system.

Results checkpoint: How are we doing?

Although there were more goals to achieve, the collaboration had grown so much by this stage that the teams saw incredible results.

As Mike K., Responsible for Chat and Email at the PostFinance Customer Center, reports, “We have been using Unblu for more than 7 years and today we are handling more than 20,000 Unblu conversations every month“

Now, agents can either answer phone calls or the Secure Mails, which are powered by Unblu for additional security. Using this media-blending system allows them to generate different types of conversations depending on the request flow.

For example, the team has noticed that there are usually more phone calls in the morning, meaning that the system will prioritize phone calls. Whereas, in the afternoon, there is more emphasis placed on chat channels, allowing the agents to field more conversations.

In general, the results show that most customers use the chat or email channels (as opposed to phone calls) when they need to order something, have an inquiry about a transaction, or need to send a document to PostFinance.

Channel insights

Improving the mobile experience and remote consultations

The Unblu and PostFinance collaboration has been highly successful, providing the team with alternative channels and insights to better run their operations.

However, PostFinance still identified other areas of opportunity to improve the quality of their service experience – the mobile channel and remote consultations. This most recent stage in the partnership involves incorporating two Unblu capabilities into the technological fabric.

Enhancing mobile with Co-Apping

Many Co-Browsing tools on the market have been developed for desktop support and have limited functionality in a mobile environment. Co-Apping, on the other hand, is a native tool that allows agents to offer an in-app Co-Browsing experience. This is an important feature in empowering agents to better address customer needs on a widely popular channel.

Video & Voice Consultations

Finally, the team wants to enhance the experience in the authenticated e-banking areas by offering new options for video consultations. Currently, customers can choose a “branch consultation” or “phone consultation,” but with the new Video & Voice tool they can add this feature to the appointment scheduling service in the eFinance section.

Continual growth over time with Unblu

The strength of the relationship and collaboration with PostFinance has grown over the years, empowering the team to better address business customer needs and offer a superior service experience. We are proud of what we have accomplished alongside PostFinance and look forward to seeing what we will achieve in the future.

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