UX at the center of self-service: A success story in banking

“User experience” or, with a flashier term, “UX.” Have you noticed how frequently we hear about this term lately? From mobile apps to product design and websites to even a piece of writing, we constantly talk about how good or bad the user experience is. But what is experience exactly? And why should your business care about it?

The term “user experience” was first used in the 1990s due to the rising use of solutions and interfaces that enable people to use products and services without a live intermediary.

You can think of user experience as something related to a product or service, like a device, a mobile app, software, or a website. All the positive and negative experiences that come from a product’s design, interface, usability, navigation, visual hierarchy, information architecture, etc., are part of the user experience.

The Principles of User Experience

UX is a user’s ability to navigate your website, app or devices—and considers the thoughts, feelings and emotions they have during the experience. It’s a human-focused way of designing, led by the question: How will people interact with my website or app? Is it easy to navigate? Can the visitors find what they want? Does it load quickly? Is the language digestible?

According to Peter Morville, a pioneer in the field of User Experience and Information Architecture, the principles of user experience are:

• Useful – should fulfill a need.
• Usable – should be easy to use and enable the user to achieve their end objective effectively and efficiently.
• Findable – Content needs to be navigable and locatable.
• Credible – users should trust and believe the accuracy of what you tell.
• Desirable – design elements should arouse enthusiasm and appreciation.
• Accessible – content should be accessible to people with temporary or permanent disabilities.
• Valuable – the fduratsum of all the other factors above ensuring the created product or service delivers value to both business and customer.

User Experience and Banking

Your users’ overall experience with your products and services would influence their decision on whether they’ll buy, more importantly, whether they will come back to buy again or look elsewhere next time. So, it’s not hard to say that user experience plays a crucial role in the sustainability of your business. Therefore more companies try to adopt a UX-oriented approach while designing their products and services.

Banks are among the early adopters of the UX-oriented business approach. Knowing that good UX is essential for success, more banks are investing in new technologies to improve various products and services. They changed the traditional banking experience through digitalization. The process started with ATMs and continued with online banking through websites, mobile apps, and lately, QR technology.

Another technology that contributed to UX-oriented banking services is Voice IVR. With this Conversational AI-backed technology, traditional call centers transformed into the heart of digitalized banking services.

The evolution of Banking Call Center: From Touch-tone IVRs to Voice IVRs

Voice IVR, also known as Conversational IVR, is an AI-based technology that includes Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and machine learning (ML). The technology enables interaction with IVRs through natural speech instead of touch-tone input.

Before this technology, IVRs were touch-tone input and voice output systems. They used to allow users to select the appropriate menu only after listening to the entire menu. This affected the user experience by extending the call duration and increasing the user effort. Besides, the touch-tone IVR system was hard to update and offered a limited capacity to the users.

Unlike touch-tone IVRs, the technology behind the conversational IVR is smart and intuitive enough to understand the context and content of a conversation. Since what users say can be fully understood, the system can be easily improved by tracking which expressions are used to solve which problems. When the system can’t comprehend what a caller is saying, a live agent can take over seamlessly. The system also records such cases, and when a similar question is encountered later, the system can be easily optimized to provide the solution without human intervention.

Success Case: How did Conversational IVR boost call center experience in Yapı Kredi?

Yapı Kredi Bank is Turkey’s third largest publicly-owned bank by its asset size. Serving more than 13 million customers with more than 840 branches, this bank has a pioneering role in the Turkish financial sector. Sestek and Yapı Kredi Bank collaborated to digitalize the bank’s traditional IVR service through Conversational AI technology to offer a better user experience.

With the implementation of Sestek Conversational IVR technology, Yapı Kredi Contact Center replaced its traditional touch-tone IVR system with a fully digitalized voice IVR system. The technology saved users from losing time listening to all options to pick the right self-service menu. Being able to reach the related menu simply by speaking rather than dialing shortened call durations and contributed to an enhanced customer experience. This practical experience significantly increased the number of self-service transactions.

The project helped Yapı Kredi to achieve the following KPIs:

• Voice IVR routed 3 million calls to the contact center every month, which is 70% of total calls
• The number of self-service transactions increased by 2X
• The completion rate at voice IVR reached 65%
• Customer satisfaction score increased by 10%

Check out our case studies here to learn more.
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Replace your Ancient IVR with a modern Voice IVR

Are your customers complaining about not being able to reach you because your IVR menu is a mess? You can give an end to this problem for good. Transform your traditional IVR with Sestek’s latest Voice IVR technology and let your customer self-serve easily. Have questions in mind, let us answer them for you.

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