How Securityplus Federal Credit Union Drove 6% Growth with Voice AI

Welcome, everyone. This is, Interface AI’s January webinar. And today, we’re gonna talk to Security plus Federal Credit Union, and we’re gonna hear a little bit about how they drove six percent growth with voice AI with us.

We have an exciting agenda to talk through with you all today. We’re gonna talk a little bit about Interface AI. We always like to introduce ourselves.

We’re gonna do some demos for you today. We’ll do voice, chat, and employee AI. And then the most important part of our day is our friends from Security plus Federal Credit Union will be joining us to talk through their case study.

Finally, at the very end, we’ll be talking about the evolution of AI and what’s coming next, and then open it up for questions, a little q and a between us friends.

So really quick, though, I have a poll for you, little quiz we’ll put up on the screen.

We’ll give you a minute just to fill that out.

For those of you that’ll hear this later, we’re asking the the team here what best describes their role at their financial institution.

We’ll talk a little bit and ask you all about how you describe your current use of AI. This is incredibly exciting to us to hear more back, and it’ll help with q and a later. Your primary goal for AI in the next twelve to twenty four months, your biggest concern about using AI today? And then finally, how familiar do you feel with the terms like generative AI and agentic AI? So we’re gonna give you guys just a minute to finish filling that out.

I can see the participants rolling in. Very excited to see how the poll turns out.

Okay.

I think we can close the poll whenever the team’s ready.

Let’s see how we did.

Okay. We have I’ll just go ahead and describe who’s on the phone with you guys. We have, twenty nine percent of our participants today consider themselves c suite. We have forty seven percent as VP director and so on. And we have some friends with us today from contact center branch and then IT, which is amazing.

If we look at what we’re looking for today, how would we describe current use of AI? The majority of our folks live in one or two areas. For example, contact center or collections, so that’s super exciting.

And the primary goal for AI amongst the participants in the next twelve to twenty four months, improving self-service and satisfaction. So you came to the right place to talk to Jeff about that a little bit.

Your biggest concern about using AI today. This is this is very interesting. Thirty one percent of you are concerned about losing that human touch and relationships. Incredibly important to us as well. And then another notable thing that you all are worried about is cost complexity and change management. So we’ll talk about that too.

Finally, familiarity with these terms we talked about, generative AI and agentic AI. The majority of the group, fifty four percent said somewhat familiar and not confident in explaining. So we’ll talk about that a little more today too.

So with that, without further ado, let me introduce our guest of honor. This is Jeff Garris. He is our COO of Security plus Federal Credit Union. Thanks so much for joining us today. Then, of course, Shrinivas NJ, our founder and CEO, and myself, Amber McCollum, VP of sales here at Interface. And with that, Shri, I’d like to turn it over to you.

Thank you, Amber. I just wanna start off saying thanks Jeff, to be part of this webinar. It means a lot to us.

You know, real quick quick introduction to Interface AI as a company.

We’ve been around ten years more than ten years now.

We’ve been around before AI was really cool. So we had about two hundred employees.

We are purpose built for credit unions and community banks, so we are a QSO too.

You know, we we specifically focus as a company in offering AI solutions that help improve the self-service for both members and employees. And there’s just so much we can do just have AI do that better.

You know, we won many awards. We’ve been featured in Gartner as the best AI vendor for credit unions and banks and Kuna, Allied. We recently won a best AI award at American Banker.

We now serve over hundred financial institution, three hundred plus AI deployments, by far the largest in the industry.

And a little bit about myself. I go by Sri. I’m the cofounder CEO as Amber was introducing.

I personally come from a Credit Union family myself.

My father start started and scaled Credit Union to couple of billion. I was very fortunate. I did him a college years to help him through the technology strategy.

I don’t take much credit for the growth of the credit union. But it was fascinating growing up in a credit union family and seeing how my father was excited about the impact it was creating for the members every day.

You know, definitely, he rubbed me off that passion to some degree. And then I went to Microsoft for my journey professional journey on AI. And, you know, when we started interface AI, I bought the best of the both the worlds, creating my personal life and professional career of AI to start interface AI at the perfect intersection.

Bruce Kim, my cofounder CTO, he’s he was a very successful entrepreneur before even we met.

He actually started the first ever billing company in the world, serving three hundred of the Fortune five thousand companies. And, you know, we got together to start Interface AI. So it’s been an amazing ride.

You know, the as a as a company, you know, really focused on applying AI to improve your member self-service, we have been very ambitious how far this can go. Right? So this is our vision laid out for the next two to two to five years. Everything on the left side in yellow is the things we already have executing very well and we have products on. The blue is where we are going in the next two to three years.

So, you know, where we are today is we are this one AI brain that help with member and employee self-service.

It’s self-service often is misunderstood as just doing what members ask or doing what employees ask, but we are kind of breaking that norm through AI to take into a a next level where self-service means it’s intelligent, proactive.

You know, it is it is gonna tell you what you need to be doing rather than just doing what you ask. So, you know, our AI today has ability to offer product recommendation that would be very important and valuable for the members during the conversation.

You know, probably, they’re leaving too much cash on the checking account. It has ability to recommend, hey, you know, why not open this certificate deposit or move into money market account? So, know, it is thinking on behalf of the member for the best outcome for their financial well-being and offers those suggestions.

We also use computer use agents. What that means is it’s an AI that has ability to proactively navigate different desktop and browser application. Like, today, you know, in a credit in a company bank, our frontline staff and employees use, like, twenty, thirty different systems. We have to train them across all the systems. We build a technology called computer use agent where it’s like an intelligent RPA. It’s a fancy new name the industry has given, but it has ability to take actions and complete actions on behalf of employees so they’re not stuck in, like, repetitive work.

And then we are also end of this year going live with our first customer who’s gonna replace their entire online mobile banking with a fully AI first online mobile banking. That would be a huge milestone, enabling our AI to power the entire self-service, not just on the voice and chat.

We’re really excited about that end of this year. Where are we going next? We see the future is a where you can provide, like, a bank GPT, like, basically, like a chat GPT, like, assistant for your members that they could use it as a primary financial assistant. So they could add multiple financial institutions they bank with to transact across all of them.

There is a quite a bit of a the the future we see is there’s a quite a bit of a a relationship between you being a primary financial institution to you being a primary financial assistant.

They’re gonna be very related. Right? The moment you work towards becoming a primary financial assistant, automatically, that AI can drive you to become a primary financial institution for that member. So we see that huge we believe in that a lot. So we’re working towards kind of a bank GPT assistant that your members could use to add multiple financial institution and bank across all of them.

When they do that, you know, the AI starts proactively prodding tips and suggestions to automatically drive to their financial goals. I always wonder when I’m sitting in my car, if my car is able to drive me from point a to point b without me actually driving, you know, what it would be like to have that for our members. Right? So so that you can autonomously drive their financial goals.

Seven seventeen percent of adults in in US are considered financially literate. Seventeen percent.

So, you know, the the you know, there’s a much need of an AI can autonomously tell them what to do and do it on behalf of them. The you know, the expert that’s thinking on behalf of them. So that’s what something we’re really passionate about to make sure that AI can fulfill the credit union mission of really truly helping members achieve their financial well-being.

So that’s kind of the big vision we’re working towards. Very exciting days ahead.

You know, that when you kind of go down that path, you will have hundred percent of your member interactions, either it’s chat or voice or online world banking powered by AI that that that would, you know, the moment you enable that hundred percent traction powered by AI automatically, it creates some more value for the institution.

And but this self-service is not just for members. It’s also employees.

This is how we see the vision.

The future of our self-service stack would look something like this. You will have a employee self-service and a member self-service, but they’re same brain connected to your all your back end system.

So they’re constantly learning and, you know, making employee and member experience better. For example, if your employee AI is able to answer a policy and procedure and you’re able to train employee AI to do better, automatically, your member facing AI becomes better. But if you make your member facing AI better, it automatically makes your employee AI better. It’s like a watch your sloop because it connects to the same AI brain is where we see this industry is going.

Beneath all of this vision and capability, there’s this core technology that needs to power all of this. Right? So, you know, we ourselves have gone through this journey for ten years being around doing AI.

We were very scrappy NLP bots in the past.

Ourself where we used to work with our clients and, you know, give them so much work to script every single responses.

It’s we’ve been through the journey where it used to take a long time to launch, and there is some bit of member experience compromise because it’s not that great when it responds. This is like a journey five years back.

Then about three years back, we adapted partial generative AI where the responses were still scripted from the bot, but the request in being able to understand the member, it got better. Right? But then about a year and a half back, we moved to fully generator where the responses was fully automatically constructed, but only for informational queries as an in front of the pin queries.

And then came agentic this year.

It’s it’s leaps and bounds ahead where it actually autonomously executes transactions, finds any information without any manual scripting. You’re literally giving all your knowledge constraints as in dos and don’ts and then integrations. It’ll figure it out, navigate, and get things done for you. So it’s a exciting future. Helps us all become extremely efficient to provide the best member experience.

So that’s kind of the underlying technology pouring all of this as exciting evolution of that.

We offer a lot of solutions today. We want to show you a demo of a few of them so that as you hear from Jeff in the following session, it kind of gives you context on some of these products. So it helps better understand their journey and their impact and and the return on investment they’ve had through these products. So we’ll start with one of our flagship products, which is our Wise AI.

It’s likely our AI powered phone banking. So and it’s a very straightforward product.

You know, what it does is it basically picks up hundred percent of incoming calls and answers a lot of the questions either in front of the pin, behind the pin questions in an autonomous way.

It it reads everything from the documents you upload or website content and automatically answers those without manual scripting.

And it also has a way to help you with transactions. It also finds opportunities to provide financial insight, upsell a product or a service that would make a difference for the member. It’s also extremely good in routing the call to the right queue. We’ve all been there.

Every time we call, we are worry like, we are frustrated in the the press one, press two menu. We end up clicking zero zero zero. Guess what? We went to the wrong queue.

And then someone says, I’m gonna transfer it to the right person.

You know? So AI has ability to avoid that frustration for both the employee and the member. So we’ll see some of this in action. I’m gonna invite my colleague here, Hayden, to quickly show the demo. He’s gonna call up the bot and put it on loudspeaker. I one quick note before he starts the demo.

What you’re gonna hear is the next version that Security plus is upgrading to. This is the if you if you go to their website, find a phone number and call, you experience something little different because this one version behind, what we’re showing you is the version ahead. So just I want I wanna kinda keep keep have you guys keep that in mind. And, Hayden, do you want to show us the demo?

Sure. Alright. So I’m gonna call the demo line, put it on speaker, just take you through a couple of quick examples.

Hello. I am Alex. Welcome to Security plus Federal Credit Union. Please note that this call may be recorded for quality assurance and training purposes.

Your privacy is important to us. You can ask for my help with anything. For example, you can say account balance, deposit status, transfer funds, transaction history, or loan payment. What can I help you with today?

I’m planning to buy a used car. What auto loan rates do you offer for a sixty month term?

Please wait a moment.

For a used auto loan with sixty month term, our rates start as low as five point four nine percent APR. If you set up automatic payments, you can get a zero point two five percent discount on that rate. Would you like me to connect you with a representative to go over more details?

No. Thanks. I forgot my online banking password. Can you help me reset it?

Give me just a second.

I can help you reset your online banking password. You can start by going to the digital banking sign in screen and clicking on forgot username, which also lets you reset your password. If you’re already logged in on the app or website, you can update your password under settings, then security. Would you like me to help you with anything else?

What is your routing number?

One moment, please.

The routing number for Security plus Federal Credit Union is two five two zero seven six seven one four. You’ll use this for direct deposits or wire transfers. If you’d like, I can transfer you to a representative for any more help with that.

No. Thanks. Can you tell me my current balance real quick in my checking and savings account?

Just a moment, please. To check the balances of your checking and savings accounts, I’ll need to verify your identity first.

Could you please provide your member number? It should be between five to ten digits.

Sure. My member number is one six zero two three.

Please hold briefly.

Thanks for that. Now could you please provide the last four digits of your Social Security number or credit card? It should be exactly four digits.

Sure. The last four of my social are one zero eight one.

Give me just a moment.

Your business checking account ending with seven eight nine zero has a current and available balance of one thousand dollars. Your vacation savings account ending with zero nine eight seven shows a current and available balance of two thousand dollars. Would you like to check any other account balances?

No. Thanks. Actually, I wanna transfer a hundred dollars from my checkings to my savings account. Can you do that?

Please hold briefly.

Before we get started with your transfer, I’ll need to send you a verification code. I can send it by text to the number ending in nine eight nine eight or nine eight nine nine or to your email at john dot doe at interface dot a I or jane dot doe at interface dot a I. Which would you prefer?

Please text it to the nine eight nine eight number.

One moment, please.

I sent the verification code to the phone number ending in nine eight nine eight. Just enter the code when you get it, and we can continue with your transfer.

Sure. The code is one two three four five six.

Please wait a moment.

Got your code. Thanks.

You want to transfer one hundred dollars from your business checking account ending with seven eight nine zero to your vacation savings account ending with zero nine eight seven.

Does that sound right?

Yes.

Working on that now.

Great. The transfer of one hundred dollars between your accounts is complete.

The transaction ID is four seven seven four four. It may take a little while to show up on your accounts.

Would you like to review recent transactions to confirm?

Yes. Can I view recent transactions in my checking account?

Please wait a moment.

You have your business checking account ending with seven eight nine zero. I’m pulling up your recent transactions now.

Would you like me to go over the last few so you can confirm your transfer and other activity?

Yes.

Just a moment.

Here are your recent transactions in your business checking account ending with seven eight nine zero, a monthly interest credit of forty five dollars on November twenty eighth, a debit of seventy five dollars on November twenty seventh at Souvenir Shop for beach towels, a credit of three hundred dollars on November twenty sixth from a side gig payment, a debit of one hundred and fifty dollars on November twenty fifth at a seafood grill restaurant, a credit of two hundred and fifty dollars on November twenty fourth from a paycheck deposit. Would you like to see more transactions for this account?

No.

I I don’t recognize a few transactions, you know, especially the one from Souvenir Shop. I’m afraid it might be fraud, and I’m concerned. Can you help me with that?

Please wait a moment.

I understand your concern about those transactions, especially the one from the souvenir shop.

Right now, our representatives aren’t available to help with suspected fraud. I can transfer you to a representative as soon as they’re available. Or if you’d like, I can help with something else for now.

Thank you.

Alright. That that’s the end of the AIB or the the voice demo.

Thank you, Hayden. I appreciate it.

I I wonder why you’re transferring dollars from your business checking to vacation savings, Hayden.

But that was a great demo. Appreciate it. So I hope you noticed it was pretty natural. I was able to get transactions, and it was able to pull all the information from the website in real time and answer questions. You you don’t feel like you’re scripting a bot. Sometimes it feels like, you know, you you have invested creating so much knowledge.

And when you use certain AI products, it feels like you’re starting over. But here, it just takes everything you already have and, you know, gives you a a better experience for your members.

You’d I hope you noticed how it was preventing fraud through stepping up the authentication.

It was even able to kind of make those cryptic tran transaction description and make it explainable a little bit. So that was all AI doing that.

So there’s exciting experience there for your members.

Appreciate the quick demo there, Hayden. So, you know, there is a lot going on there. You know, in the interest of time, we’re gonna go on and talk about a few other things.

So specifically, the chat AI demo, This is another suite of products we offer. We wanna quickly show you how the same brain that was used for voice AI could extend to chat as well.

So we’ll we’ll show a quick demo of that, and we’ll move to the employee AI for a couple of minutes here. So this is a hypothetical bank we created just to give an idea. So you can see the AI on your website, right bottom corner. You can click it and pop it open.

And, you know, you could ask any questions there. So let’s press that here quick. Yeah. We can we can go and try to look for a credit card. I’m looking for a credit card. You know?

What what do you offer?

So it it is asking me, are you currently a member of the credit union?

You know, we’ll go ahead and respond to that question here saying no.

Then it says, okay. Great. I can help you to set up the membership and then credit card application, but let’s let’s find out what kind of credit card you want.

And and, you know, you can actually go ahead, let the AI do the research for you. You can say, you know what? I want to save more and probably have cash back.

You can type that in. And the AI’s ability to say, hey. You know what? Let me go find that for you and takes control of your member screen and automatically navigates, finds that credit card, and brings it to you to the right screen so that you can actually, you know, check check it out and even summarize on the right side, like, where’s this credit card, how why is it a good fit for you and whatnot.

At the bottom, it says, you know, hey. Do you wanna now apply for this credit card and membership? Right? You you can click on that.

And then, you know, it has ability to analyze the application and say, you know what? Why don’t you go and upload these documents for me? I’m gonna fill up the application for you automatically. So you can quickly upload some documents based on its request, and it’ll analyze that, make sure it has all the information.

And it says, hey. Can I go ahead and apply on behalf of you? You say yes, and the AI takes over and starts, you know, applying it. This is a terms and condition. You click agree, and then it’s automatically navigating your online application, filling up the application on behalf of you. We have another tool that could make us even more lazy.

So it finished up the application without you having to your member having to spend a lot of time, and now it’s starting the application process for credit card too. Often, end up having two different systems, account opening and, you know, loans. So it is able to kind of make sure the AI is able to stitch in that together rather than your members having to reenter multiple times.

So that’s that’s done. So AI is acting as a true assistant doing the work on behalf of your members. Right? So now let’s say you’re online mobile banking.

So you quickly log in here, and the AI will be there too. So you can click and pop it open. You could ask some questions here, wanna move the money. It’s the same AI that we saw in on the voice as well.

So it says send thousand dollars from my savings to check-in.

It can, you know, it can take care of it because you already authenticated, And you click yes. Let’s do it. Finish the transaction. So it’s a great companion for your online mobile banking. So sometimes it gets too complicated to go find exact buttons and forms and online banking. So AI is able to just complete that seamlessly.

Here, it’s saying, I don’t recognize this thousand dollar charge from Amazon. It was able able to quickly find the transaction, give you option to dispute.

So, you know, you also have that mic button there. You can click into it and talk into it.

Right? So let’s skip ahead to the subscription. So let’s say, you know, one of the questions we all ponder on today is, like, how many subscriptions we have?

You know? That’s such a broken setup. You know, you have to have so many apps.

Right? So so let’s say you are, you know, wondering how many subscriptions you have for the last twelve months, and you can just type it in. And the AI has ability to quickly get that information and show it to you. So here, it is able to take control, automatically navigate your online banking to find the accounts and download tran statements for each account, analyze those statements, and, you know, kind of give you a summary of that right here. So, you know, you you’re still within online banking, but this kind of the AI took over the experience to answer that question. But if you go to the right top corner, you can click on it and it’ll automatically dismiss. But this person definitely needs help, the six thousand dollars in last year.

But, you know, that’s that’s how easy it is to have AI help you get things done and find information.

We’re gonna quickly show you the employee side, especially if AI is able to answer so many questions. But then the ones that AI is unable to answer to your member, what happens to the rest of the member questions? Right? So the AI seamlessly hands it off to your your frontline staff, and then this is the employee AI for your frontline staff.

Now the AI starts augmenting your frontline staff to help them to answer the questions that AI could not answer. Right? So you can see there’s active calls and chats. So we open up one of them here real quick.

So the moment they pick up their call, the screen shows them the entire context they need to know, you know, is the is there any detected fraud, conversation history, caller authenticated themselves or not. And the AI on the left side automatically brings up the policy and procedure, says, hey, for this question, here is your policy that you need to follow. So you click on the blue button. It’ll even bring up the right document, highlight the document, auto scroll for you.

So your employees are now empowered to quickly find the right information to respond to that, the member query. Right? So, you know, the AI is not just showing you the policy and procedure. It can also, you know, take action.

So let us go to another call to show you that.

So because we integrate we already integrated your core and everything.

Now here, another call, someone is trying to, you know, lock their cashback credit card.

You know, your staff can come on the left side and say lock card, And the AI offers, hey. Can I go and lock this card for you? You say yes.

Automatically, the AI connects to the back end system through API RPA and completes that transaction. So you don’t have to have your employee trained in multiple tools and systems to be able to get this done. So they have this chat GPT like interface here. They have all the context they need, also the integration so they can get things taken care.

We are kind of with AI, we are entering the era where your employees need not to know how. They need to know what. Right? They can delegate the how to AI.

That’s a kind of interesting benefit.

And, you know, this employee AI could be used beyond your frontline staff. So let us show you that real quick.

So if you let’s say you’re a loan officer in the back end, you’re looking at all the pending loans for approval or wire transfers. So you could come in here and say, let’s review pending loan applications and wire transfer. It will pull from the same integrations. Probably a member could have asked, what is my loan application status? We would have integrated your LOS. Now employees using the same integration, same brain.

The employee here to answer a different set of questions. So it’s asking, hey. Here are your loan applications, complete issues, whatnot, and helps you kind of understand the issues on the loans and kind of thereby take actions and whatnot. So, hopefully, it gives you an idea. This could be used across all of your employees, back office, front office to get things done. So appreciate, Swarna. Thank you.

So, hopefully, it gives you a good idea on the how end to end capability of the AI here, you know, everything can do from the for the members on the voice and chat as well as for the employees.

Now to the most important topic of the day. I will hand it back to Amber to go through some of the case study with Jeff. Amber, back to you.

Awesome. Well, I get to have the best job of the whole day, which means I get to talk to Jeff.

Jeff, let me just take a minute and introduce the credit union if you don’t mind.

Jeff Garris is the COO of Security plus Federal Credit Union, and we’re sharing on our screen just a little bit about our friends there. But the piece I really thought was the most important and compelling, it kind of harkened back to the poll, people helping people. That is the entire principle that your credit union was built on. So I think it’s really cool and super interesting that you’re able to grow by six percent using one of our products.

If you go to the next slide, I just kinda wanna start asking you, Jeff, if you don’t mind, just a little bit about AI in general. What was your business strategy? How was your business strategy delivered more effectively just with AI in general?

Hi, Amber. Thanks for having me on today. I’m super excited to be here and in front of so many credit union and financial institution professionals today. So thank you for that opportunity.

You know, wanna start by talking about a little bit of a journey. So I think through a story, we can understand a little bit better about a business strategy. And for us, it all started with some robotic process automation. And and like most credit unions I believe out there, they were tired of telling their employees, hey.

Pick up this file. Move it over here.

So they introduced this wonderful tool, the original AI, robotic process automation, that could take those routine tasks and automate them so employees could do the more uplifting, more high level jobs that need to be done, the engaging with the member. From there, we said, hey. If we can do this with simple tasks, simple routine jobs that have to be done, why can’t we do this with some decisions that have to be made? And for us, that led to automated loan decisioning. So we matured to embracing that that decision optimization so we could approve loans based on criteria that then would only refer to a loan officer if if someone, a bot, couldn’t make the decision for us.

You got to thinking about, well, how do we take this to the next step? And that’s where we can enhance really the the customer access where we drive that member experience to now giving self-service for those things that we just love. All those phone calls of, can you tell me the last five checks that have cleared? And then it was, did my direct deposit post yet? No. I’ll I’ll call back in an hour. So we really gave the member the opportunity to have twenty four seven agent support with these routine calls that they were making.

From there, we we evolved a little bit more to really providing quick answers on our website. So now you can type a question into our website, and as you’re typing that question, it’s thinking and scaling through all of our web pages to find you the answers that will be most relevant to you, saving on, again, calling or coming into one of our branch locations.

And then, of course, now we’re to the point of our employee copilot experience. So providing the knowledge and the resources right in the hands of our employees as they’re having the conversation with the member. This does two things for us. It really drives some consistency with service, but also has consistency in the conversations that we have with our members. So I tell that story because our business strategy one of our business strategies is to be simple and convenient. And by wrapping in AI throughout our experiences, whether they are member facing or whether they are employee facing, we can drive the the strategy of being simple and convenient. Makes people feel better about the job they’re doing every day, more fulfilled in what they’re doing, and gives the member the answers faster.

I love it. It really is people helping people. Right?

Absolutely.

I love that. Well, I wanna talk a little bit oh, here are some of the things that you just shared with us. One of the things, I know we’re gonna talk about next, that was sort of just sort of how did AI in general inform your business strategy. But I actually wanted to go a little bit deeper and a little more targeted and talk specifically about phone call automation with you and the team. Today, we, Interface AI is in production at Security plus FCU, and this is sort of a little bit about how we’re working with your team. You’ve been live with us since twenty twenty two, and we are integrated today with Fiserv and Talkdesk over there at the credit union.

If we go to the next slide, I have a number to share with you, Sri. I think you even mentioned it earlier. Here is that magic number that we hope you’ll call, four one zero two eight one sixty two hundred. You can experience talking to Security plus Federal Credit Union’s bot just by calling the number above. But we don’t want you to do it right now. Give us till the end of the call, and then you can have added.

So with that, I kinda wanted to dive in a little deeper, Jeff, specifically talking about voice. So with that, what were the problems you were trying to solve with Voice AI?

Well, our first and foremost problem is the call that everybody hates when they work in the credit union world, and that was the, Jeff, your IVR is being sunset. And it was not even an IVR. I think that’s a very misleading term. It was phone banking.

And for those of us that have been in the credit union industry for a long time, we know the phone banking. We know the we know the number to call, and we know the sequence of numbers to push on the phone. Yes. Push on the phone to get to the point where we find out our balances.

So we got that call that our current IVR phone banking system was no longer going to be supported and would be sunset, and we were faced with a decision on what to do next. So problem one, we had to replace a legacy system.

The next part was when you think about an employee sitting in a chair eight hours a day and wanting to feel good about the job that they do, it’s really hard to boost someone and build engagement when twenty percent, twenty five percent, thirty percent of their calls are all about what is my balance, what are the last five checks, and did my direct deposit post yet. But we know those are the common calls that occur. So we had some inefficient staff employee utilization. They were spending too much time on the basic low hanging fruit calls that we knew we could solve through AI.

The next was just basically an outdated member experience because the system that we have, that legacy system, was truly just a telephone banking system, and it was not keeping up with the times. And just as you stated a minute ago, this was just twenty twenty two, so we’re very new to giving this technology to our members.

You know, we also needed to get callers to people when they needed to talk to someone. You know, that we’ve all been there with the the person that is standing at the airport and their debit card stopped working, and they just wanna talk to somebody and say, please reactivate my debit card. I’m trying to get on a plane, and sometimes we just have to get them to the person. But if if the persons or agents are all on the phone with everybody finding out about their balances, it causes a bottleneck to those people that we really want to be there for all the time.

And last, we wanted to meet our members where they were. We have a wide range of ages in our membership. Some of them want the personal touch, that glove treatment. Some of them want to never speak to to anybody but to use the automation.

I often joke that if I didn’t work for Accredit Union, they would never see me because I’m the one on my phone doing everything. But here I am working here, I love it, by the way. But we want to make sure that you can meet me where I am as a member and meet my mom where she is as a member because she’s never getting on the phone to do anything. She will go to a branch.

So giving members choices, building in intentionally those, those are the problems we were trying to solve. And like many of us, this is the short list of problems we’re trying to solve. Right?

It’s more than just the five. Right.

That makes so much sense, and I love that. I don’t think there’s any better way to respect our members than to give them a choice. When do you wanna talk to a person? How can we help you faster if that’s your desire? I’d love that. I think that’s amazing.

So here’s one of my favorite questions. Yeah. What made you choose Interface dot ai?

So I I will be completely honest. I was not at this credit union when the choice was made, but I’m glad they made the choice. This solution, this partnership, it’s built for credit unions. One of my favorite things about it is that it is natural conversation.

You heard just a few minutes ago talking to to our bot, and I hate to even call it a bot because it sounds so realistic, like you’re actually talking to someone. So the voice options that are available, that were available, that are available, they make us feel comfortable about the engagement. It’s truly an interactive conversation rather than a reactive conversation. When I think about how we implemented it as an organization, it was two teams working together towards a common goal to enhance an experience and to really drive efficiencies for us, which I know we’re gonna get to in a minute, I don’t wanna give away the big reveal yet, but to really, really drive efficiencies for us.

Most of all, it was it was a strategic fit for us. The the partnership aligned with our goals, our strategic direction of being simple and convenient. We really wanna make it easy to do business with us, and that’s what this enabled us to do.

I love that. And I think that really speaks to our audience today too. It’s sort of talking about all the different things we hit in the poll. We’re naturally sort of, able to answer them right now.

Back to the the question about collaborative implementation and something we saw on the poll, which is, is it hard? You know, the pace of change. What’s the lift? Could you walk us through your implementation journey?

Sure. So we had an initial setup. And as, Sri mentioned, in the beginning, it was filling out a whole bunch of what to do next, here’s what to do next, here’s what to do next. We’ve evolved a lot from there.

But, you know, the process was very workflow esque, and it was a it was a heavy lift. I’m gonna say that this is the hardest part of the story for me for me to tell, and and here’s why. We wanted to show that we listen to our members. So we did an entire voice of member survey, and we heard some hard truths about Security plus through that.

And and one of them was that we were hard to do business with, and another one was that we were not technologically forward thinking.

So we knew that we needed to make a difference there, and we needed to have an impact on the lives of our members.

And so we worked through the process, the partnership with the interface team, and we decided we were going to make a splash out of this. And we named our bot Cody, and we actually made a splash about hiring Cody, this new person that was going to answer all of your calls, was going to direct you to the right place, was going to help you whenever they could, and we expected that our members were going to say, thank you, Security plus, for coming forward and being technologically savvy.

That is not what occurred.

Our members actually revolted. Within a few months, we had more complaints, not about the solution, but about how they interacted with the solution. We had complaints. We had picketing at our annual meeting, which ended up lasting many more hours than we anticipated it would be.

And the reason was because our even though our members told us that we need it easier and they wanted us to be technologically savvy, what we didn’t hear from them was, to them, that meant they want it the way they want it. They wanna be able to interact the way they want to interact. They wanna be able to use automation when they wanna use automation, and they wanna talk to a person when they wanna talk to a person across that whole demographic again. So we had to make a quick pivot, and we had to fire Cody.

It was a very upsetting day. We we we made a decision that Cody no longer works for this organization. We listened again to the feedback that our members had given us from many different avenues, and we had to pivot. We had to transition to a new, new be simple mindset.

And with that, we had a we now had a main call tree again, but members could easily get to the bot. And once we got them to the bot, they have been using it like there is no tomorrow. So now what we’ve done is put it a little bit behind the scenes, but it worked for our membership because they felt they were empowered to choose when they use the bot and when they talk to a person. So I guess what we can say is when we talk about collaborative refinement, you know, we refine the process with intent.

We refine the process with purpose. We gave options to talk to the bot when you wanted to or to talk to a person when you when you wanted to, and we monitor the points of those interactions. We look at where did the bot stop with the automation, and how can I make that speed bump go away so the bot can move forward the next time that person calls?

So it was it was a hard journey. It was some lessons learned along the way.

You know, listen to your member, but listen to your member. So we we’re glad of where we are today and where we’re going to be in the very near future.

I love that. I don’t think there’s again, to being able to go on the journey with your members, to hear the hard truths, to bring them something amazing, then have to pivot on that, and then to have the results. That brings us to the next question. Right? The big reveal is, what kind of impact have you seen and what is the adoption? And spoiler, I do have a chart.

So we can we can actually show some visuals. Do you mind, Jeff, you wanna walk through with this a little bit?

Yeah.

So this is one of my most exciting moments, and I’m I’m thrilled to see this chart actually because while I’m humble, I do like to see these numbers every once in a while.

A humble brag.

You know, when we when you look at this chart, so what resonates with me, this is more than ten thousand calls that our bot is is taking a month. That is two to three times more than our call center does. The automation is working more than eighty percent of the time. These calls are being handled through automation one hundred percent.

There are there are times that it does have to go to an agent, but those are the right times for it to go to a to an agent. So we have this mindset at at Security plus of first contact resolution. The bot is actually living our mindset as well. For eighty in December, eighty four point nine percent of the time, first contact resolution handled it from beginning to end.

No no other person had to be involved. So and I love that we’re also very consistent with our calls and numbers. And I believe me, I watch those numbers, and we have some members that call fifty times in a month. But they’re not getting through to an agent because they can handle everything they want through the bot.

Oh my gosh. I have another slide actually that we can sort of talk through.

Oh, go wanna add the the important part here that I kind of felt is that was amazing is is this is a true measure of automation. It’s it’s not like a containment when, you know, a member asked a question they couldn’t authenticate. They hung up. We’re not measuring that as a sexist.

Right? So here, automation means that every single one of these calls, members actually got why they called in for, and they hung up not requesting to talk to a staff member. So that’s what this means. Right?

So Cody did his whole job.

Yeah.

Whole whole job end to end. Right? So, yeah, that’s exciting to see. Eighty five percent. That’s huge.

I love it. Well, and on the heels of the member journey that you described to us too that, you know, you had to put Cody in the right spot and look what happened. So, Jeff, back to you. Yeah.

We don’t call him Cody anymore.

So That’s I knew that, actually.

You fired him.

So some of our some of our other impacts, though, and thank you for having this, is, you know, that that we were able to shift employees from the routine low hanging fruit to the high value interactions that they can have with members. And who does who wants to who doesn’t wanna go home at night and say, you know what? I helped three members today, ten members today, and this is the difference I made in their life, which leads us to the job satisfaction. They’re having real impact.

Our agents are having real impact on our members. They’re making a difference with every interaction. Makes them want to come to work the next day because they know there’s value to that. Our membership growth, you know, overall, we’ve seen some some great membership growth, and it’s been consistent membership growth.

So I I love that we can get new accounts pushed towards us through through the system. And, of course, the last one, when you become easy to work with and you are simple and convenient, people think security plus first, and that boosts our share of wallet. So then they’re telling believe me, they’re telling their friends about the experience they had, which then is another referral for us.

I love that. Thank you so much. That is very compelling information. Do you have any best practices that you might suggest for FIs that are looking to adopt AI solutions?

Absolutely. So, first, I’m a Disney fan for those that didn’t know it on the call. So if you’ve ever seen Ratatouille, you’re gonna hear anybody can cook. That goes along with this first slide. Right? So anybody, anyone can replace a system.

But instead, you need to reimagine the process.

Rethink the process to find the right partner that’s going to drive you along there.

Find the sweet spot in the member service. So we talked about how we thought we heard our members, but we didn’t really hear our members. That sweet spot is gonna be different for every financial institution.

Find your sweet spot and know how much you can automate and how quickly you can do that as opposed to how much you need to handhold and move people along on a journey with you.

Know, for for your employees, reassure them. You know, talk to them about what’s changing for them, when it’s going to change, and how it’s going to change. And if you really want them engaged in it, include them in the process when you’re building it out or when you’re making changes to it. They feel a part of it, they own it, and they’ll feel much better about supporting it for you as well.

I believe in business partnerships, So find the partner you want to work with, not the company that offers the system. Because if all you’re looking for is a company that offers a system, there’s hundreds of them out there, but it won’t help you grow as an organization, it won’t help you become more simple, and it won’t help you engage your members further.

And then finally, just be intentional about your solution and be dedicated to this solution and making it better every day. And we do look at it maybe not every day because we all have those moments, but we look at our our nonautomated responses almost weekly, if not more, just to see where we can reduce barriers to success for the member.

So be committed to making it a better solution.

It sounds like an AI strategy is a living, breathing thing for the It has to be.

It just like the member service that walks in the branch, it has to be something you’re dedicated to, or or it won’t succeed.

Yeah. Amazing.

And and the the beauty of AI is it it can learn and grow and keep adding more value to your members and you that’s kind of the by nature of that AI, how it works. It’s perfectly aligned with the feedback loop you’re creating and continuously improving on things. Right? So, yeah, it’s, it’s amazing store amazing journey there, with your team.

Fantastic. Well, the what’s next on the road map for voice AI for you? I I actually think, Shree, you may have given it away earlier today. I think we may have heard what is next for you all.

It’s We did.

And, I mean, he even surprised me because I didn’t know we were using security plus as module as an example. So that was very exciting because we’re not stopping where we are. We recognize that stopping where we are is not going to meet the needs of our members in the future at all. So we are very much looking forward to the agentic voice AI and building that out and getting that in front of our members.

We’re you know, I’m sorry. I’m a little lots of stardust right now because Sri had that example with Hayden. So thank you very much for that. But, really, we wanted to answer more questions. We wanted to build on the experience. We want it to be of more value to our members, and we know that we that we can get there.

I it. Jeff, thanks so much for your time today. We have so appreciated having this dialogue, and I think you more than proved that AI is more human than we all thought. Right?

Yep. I appreciate it, Amber. Thank you.

Thank you.

Sri, back to you.

Thank you, Amber. Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate you being here. It means a lot to us. We got just a few more minutes to go.

You know, I was hoping to take a couple of minutes here to give you a quick like, we could probably go into the q and a here. Right, Amber? So we got a few questions.

We can take that up, and I see some questions to Jeff as well.

Awesome.

Let me see if I can pull it up.

Here we go.

One of the questions to you is, what was your marketing strategy? How did you help members, especially elderly members on board?

Well, our marketing strategy from the start didn’t work to hire hire an employee and really announce that. So we have really just engaged as another level of of member interaction, not necessarily specifically called out using the the, Interface AI solution, the partnership that we have. But when we market, we tell people they can visit a branch, call, or go on the website. So what we do is we drive to whichever way they feel more comfortable engaging with the credit union, and then from there, they can find the solutions. We don’t for many of us that were in telephone banking for a long time, you know, you skip out those little postcards that told you all little codes to push.

We’re not about giving out more paper or anything like that. It really is about driving people to the solution that they find the most valuable for them.

Nice. Yeah. Makes sense. I think it’s the way I I kind of just to add to that, Jeff, you know, the baby boomers, elderly members, the AI is actually a a better tool because, honestly, it just removes the learning curve.

Right? You’re you’re talking as if you’re talking to a human being. So it’s, you know, it’s actually using IVR is harder than using AI in in some way. Right?

So, you know, human beings have been speaking for five thousand years.

We just only twenty years back started using keyboards and mouse and smartphones and things like that. So we are more wired as a human brain to get things done by talking. So you’re actually removing the barrier, especially challenging for elderly members to adapt a new technologies. There’s no learning. You just call and talk as if you’re talking to a human being. So that helps. So that’s why AI is a a great tool for teenage members who want to always text, no one on call, you know, and and also great for LA members who call.

It’s just helps across the spectrum. Right? So there’s another story here. Sorry. Question.

How are you linking this to membership growth membership growth to the strategy shift?

Though membership growth is obviously our our strategy, and there’s very many tactics that we use to do that. One of them I’ve mentioned a few times is that just being simple to do business with. So in the in the scheme of that engagement with the bot, you know, really driving them to easily opening an account from that point or applying for a loan, whatever, may getting to a branch if they need to. So, again, it is our strategy of of growth, obviously, with a a tactic of making it easy to do business with us. And this solution allows us to get something in the hands of the member quickly to open an account and then walk through the process either online or in branch.

Great.

There’s one last question. I know we’re top of the hour.

How do you how do you work on adoption rate when member refuse to talk to bot?

Well, that and that is challenging. But most of the times when they refuse to talk to a to the bot, they are actually getting to an agent, and then we can follow-up on that conversation to see what was it that got them to have to come through to an agent. We can follow the whole path from they got to the bot, they got transferred to an agent, where did that agent pick up, and then it allows us to make the experience a little bit easier in the bot if that’s what they want, or we can help them through it by on the phone with an agent.

Absolutely. Makes sense. And I think that’s the key to a great experience.

You don’t you know, just just have your AI follow what your members want. Right? That’s important. Member experience has to be the first priority. Efficiency has to be the second.

And the the AI, is built right and optimized right, can ensure that goals are achieved.

You know, I I have one last announcement.

For all the participants who’ve been here as as a way to say thank you, we want to offer you the our most advanced fraud solution, face ID fingerprint ID kind of scanning on device biometric product and caller ID forensics at no cost.

So, you know, please take up on that. Whenever you get a chance, this is our way to express gratitude for you taking out one hour of your time to come listen to our journey here with our our partner, Jeff. So with that, appreciate you all joining us for the webinar. This has been an exciting journey hearing from Jeff, and it kind of reminds us every day why we wake up excited to solve these problems. So thank you, Jeff, and thank you, Amber. Thanks, everyone.

Bye, everybody. Thanks, Jeff.

Bye. Thank you.

See you. Bye.