Skipton Building Society staff 'freed up for right customer conversations' with major AI rollout
Artificial intelligence tools are freeing up Skipton Building Society staff to provide a better service to the mutual’s one million members, the group’s chief information officer has told The Yorkshire Post.
Jenny Wood said the society is already seeing improvements as a result of the recent completion of a three-year multi-million pound IT project using Microsoft technology it has completed with the support of longstanding partner KPMG.
The digital transformation project involves a new customer engagement platform with advanced data and analytics tools to provide better understanding of individual members, as well as the launch of Microsoft AI tool Co-Pilot in Service.
The society anticipates the changes will result in time savings of up to 20 per cent for staff when searching for information to help customers along with reductions in call volumes and complaints. It believes the changes will create an enhanced ability to assist members with their savings and mortgage goals.
Ms Wood said there is an 87 per cent satisfaction rate among the 1,000 workers using the new system.
“What we’re seeing is more time spent having the right conversations with our members,” she said. "Previously when someone came in and said, ‘I’ve got this product with you and I’ve asked these questions previously but I’d like to talk more about it’, a staff member would have to read through all the notes to understand the situation. What we can do now is summarise that really quickly and really quickly get to what the member wants to talk to us about. It is using AI to help colleagues and a really good use of AI.
“It is ‘AI with human in the loop’. It is there to make things faster but ultimately the conversation you are having is with a person.”
She added: "Success is actually we get more people in homes and help our members save for the future. Ultimately as a mutual that is what it all comes back to.
"If you take it down to the next layer, we want to make it easier for our members and colleagues to do the things they want to. It means it is going to be faster and fewer interactions over things that can be done at the click of a button.”
She said more than 100 staff have been involved in rolling out the programme and the additional use of AI is to complement the work of staff rather than allow for job cuts.
""We’ve grown as we’ve taken the programme forward. We are freeing people up to have the right conversations – we are really keen to make sure our branch colleagues and our call centre colleagues are able to spend time talking to our members about the things that matter to them.”
Katie Clinton, head of regional financial services for KPMG, said it has been great to support the rollout of the “flagship” project.
"As far as this project is concerned, we have been there literally since Day One. We’ve worked closely with Skipton to define and shape the vision and worked hand in glove. We’ve done that with teams based locally in Yorkshire, across the wider UK and our delivery centres overseas as well. We planted our roots as a firm in the North of England over 150 years ago. This project continues to evidence the commitment we have to the North and Yorkshire in particular.”