Southern Cross Credit Union asks AI agent to handle account balance requests

Southern Cross Credit Union has deployed an AI agent called Nova, initially to handle inbound service calls from customers seeking their account balances.

The “AI powered phone assistant” has been online for a couple of months, and was featured at Salesforce’s World Tour Essentials event in Melbourne on Tuesday.

Nova was built and deployed in six weeks in partnership with so-called forward deployed engineers (FDEs) from Salesforce - an increasingly common arrangement in the enterprise AI space.

It is based primarily on Agentforce Voice - and is the first such agent to launch on the platform in the A/NZ region.

Nova also connects back to the credit union’s Salesforce platform - which it uses to identify and verify the customer, and to SCCU’s core banking system “to be able to provide real-time account balances to our customers”, the credit union’s Salesforce platform manager Melissa Marsh said.

“We were really fortunate to be selected to be part of the Agentforce Voice pilot program, so that gave us access to the Salesforce FDEs,” she said.

Chief customer officer Jessica Jackson said that the deployment of the agent came at a time when call wait times had increased from an average of “under two minutes” out to “nearly eight minutes”, and sometimes much more.

“[It] meant that customers who really needed to talk to one of our service representatives were having to wait longer than what we were comfortable with,” Jackson said.

Jackson said that now, account balance inquiries could be handled by Nova, and that this had been positively received by customers.

By taking on account balance inquiries, the agent is handling seven percent of all calls to the credit union, according to a written case study.

The case study also notes plans by the credit union to launch “a ‘click to chat’ website agent for general questions such as branch hours, drawing on [Salesforce] Data 360 to pull answers from knowledge articles, with plans to extend Nova’s voice capabilities to similar questions.”

Southern Cross Credit Union primarily serves the Northern Rivers region of NSW as well as South East Queensland.