Case Study: Banco Itaú

CUSTOMER PROFILE

01 THE BEFORE

A legacy of constraints

Banco Itaú is one of the largest financial institutions in Latin America, with a contact center operation to match. The bank, which has been on NICE Workforce Management (WFM) for more than 20 years, was nonetheless anchored by an on-premises contact center platform that was limiting its ability to integrate with an increasingly complicated network of 2,000 internal agents, 14,000 business process outsourcing (BPO) agents, and more than 100 product- or channel-specific operations.

“We were lacking data, it wasn’t scalable or flexible, and everything we needed to develop required support from external vendors,” says Itaú Planning Manager Pablo Alcino Martins of the bank’s legacy platform

02 DESIRE TO CHANGE

Building credit and banking on service

Among the bank’s 100+ products, one in particular sparked a desire to change. Itaú’s credit card operations, collectively known as Cartão Branco, were slated for a strategic transformation, which would expand and modernize how the bank produced cards and managed its credit card portfolio. The Cartão Branco transformation effort was high profile internally and would impact millions of customers and thousands of brands for which Itaú provided full credit card operations, from plastic generation and handling to transaction management and customer service.

“The initiative completely changed the strategic direction for credit card production and management, and in turn we needed to modernize how we serviced credit card customers as well,” said Martins.

Modernization meant visibility. The bank’s Cartão Branco service operations were distributed across 300 agents and two different BPOs, and the bank’s ability to track and manage key performance indicators (KPIs) was hindered by clunky integrations. The KPIs they could track were lackluster at best and impossible to validate at worst.

In pursuit of integration, transparency, and the ability to not just track KPIs more thoroughly but also respond to resulting insights with agility, Itaú turned to NICE to migrate around 8,000 seats to CXone, with particular emphasis on Cartão Branco.

03 THE SOLUTION

Preparing for growth on a platform built to scale

Beginning in 2021, the bank spent about a year assessing and testing different solutions. It ultimately selected NICE CXone and began deployment in its strategically significant Cartão Branco operations in 2022. In addition to providing the streamlined integration that the bank required to manage its dynamic service operations effectively, CXone introduced modernized capabilities, like asynchronous chat, automated overflow distribution between BPOs, intelligent routing, and virtual assistants.

“These capabilities helped us match service center operations with the ambitious strategic direction of the overall Cartão Branco transformation,” noted Martins. CXone’s data integration and management capabilities really sold Martins on the solution.

“Given the dynamics of the bank, we are always adding new KPIs, and with each addition we were having to go into a development process with our vendor, which took too much time and effort,” said Martins. “With CXone, the integration is seamless: Data is fed into our data lake and automatically consolidated to provide a single view of our entire operating ecosystem.”

04 THE RESULTS

Data-driven performance improvements

On the backend, migrating and validating Itaú’s legacy data in the new CXone solution—originally scheduled to take three months—was completed in just one month. In that time, Martins and his team continuously added KPIs based on the new granularity of the CXone-derived insights, everything from wait times to outbound contact rates, all of which were impossible to measure in the bank’s legacy platform. Also previously impossible is the relative ease with which the bank can self-deploy development changes to accommodate new requirements or to address service or tool issues.

The transition was strategically communicated to agents, ensuring they understood the expected benefits and any new requirements along the way. The program’s transparent communications, coupled with CXone’s easy-to-use dashboard, made agent onboarding incredibly simple. And their jobs got easier, too, with cloud-based orchestration, routing, and personalized script deployment. “From the agent’s perspective, it was very easy, and we saw gains in nearly all our service levels in a very short amount of time,” said Martins.

Gains like a 10+% reduction in repeat calls, a 50% reduction in abandoned calls, an ASA improvement of 33%, and a 13% decrease in AHT were just some of the significant improvements CXone helped deliver on Itaú’s highest priority operation, Cartão Branco.

Moreover, the automated orchestration and democratization of data improved the speed and quality of back-office functions and gave supervisors real-time performance management opportunities. NICE WFM in the cloud now provides accurate back-office scheduling and forecasting. Migrating WFM from on-prem to the cloud allows Itaú to stay on the latest version and keep up to date with the newest features. “With recordings and call history integrated with quality management on one dashboard, our supervisors are empowered to bring huge benefits to the business in terms of performance improvement,” explained Martins

05 THE FUTURE

Leading with AI to orchestrate end-to-end customer journeys

Currently, about 30% of Itaú’s service operations are orchestrated through CXone. Martin and his team are continuously deploying the solution across all the bank’s products and services, including touchpoints outside the contact center, like ATMs and virtual branches. “We’re working to integrate those traditionally siloed customer touchpoints into a full customer journey to inform experiences that are efficient, consistent, and personalized no matter where or how a customer engages with us,” explained Martins.

Building off the capacity generated by AI-enabled CXone features like asynchronous chat and virtual assistants, which already retain 60% of demand for voice and 32% for chat, Itaú is developing supplementary AI solutions in-house. “We see AI as being key to orchestrating an intelligent customer journey, and to helping our agents deliver more strategic, authentic experiences,” said Martin.