Newcastle Greater Mutual Group taps AI to overhaul its customer and staff experience

Newcastle Greater Mutual Group (NGMG) has created an omnichannel environment including the introduction of a virtual customer service portal as part of work towards uplifting its customer and staff experience.

The mutual bank applied AI capabilities to its organisation as it aims to grow its 650,000 customer base.

The work followed the merger of Greater Bank and Newcastle Permanent Building Society in March 2023, forming the customer-owned NGM Group, based in the Hunter region of NSW and with total assets of more than $20 billion.

Kristy Ingall, manager of customer operations at Newcastle Greater Mutual Group told a recent Genesys Xperience Sydney audience creating the “omnichannel was really important to us and making sure that our customers are served regardless of what channel they'll come through.”

“We really tried to expand that service offering through a number of different channels. We also created greater intraday reporting and oversight over service levels, particularly in those regional branches.

“We now can focus a lot more on what [agents are] getting through, what their transactions are, where they're spending their time, whether it's behind the counter doing back office, digital work, or whether it's in front of the counter.”

Ingall added the knowledge management tools have also “been hugely beneficial to really support our agents.”

In the talk, Ingall said, “Both brands were on-prem at the time and getting across to the cloud as a key priority for us so that we could be on that single platform.”

Ingall added this would also ensure “any future technologies we could implement could also set us up for the future in terms of that simplification.

Prior to the changes, Ingall said the organisation had “multiple systems and different logins”, creating many manual heavy processes.

“The length of the onboarding process was up to six months for that speed of competency, so very in-depth and challenging for us to get to a full FTE doing a full load of work throughout the day.”

John Connolly, head of customer contact centre at Newcastle Greater Mutual Group added the team “didn't have amazing data coming out of the branch network,”

“A lot of the transaction data we used was literally stopwatch data that we put in place a number of years ago.”

Connolly also explained prior to its overhaul the organisation “didn't have a good sense across the branch network of who was doing what and when,” plus its workforce planning was “virtually non-existent.”

Customers were also asked to complete the ID process via post which made the experience “quite clunky”.

Connolly added its older demographic required face-to-face interaction leading the team to rethink work distribution for its agents.

He said the group will be “led by the customer demand as opposed to the shiny new toys” and “use our agents as wisely as possible”.

“That's quite often a richer understanding of the customer's needs… and keep fine-tuning and work with your agents, work with our customers and listen to the voice of the customer,” Connolly said.