VyStar Credit Union ($13 billion assets) opened its doors 70 years ago to service military and civil service members. Today, their staff of over 2,000 employees provides a range of financial products and services, while supporting local nonprofits and similar organizations. As the second-largest credit union in Florida, VyStar is committed to providing excellent service to their 900,000 members.

Improving Member Experience and New Employee Onboarding

In the last five years, VyStar Credit Union has doubled in asset size and remains a strong leader against its competitors. With rapid expansion comes growing pains—VyStar needed to enhance the member experience through self-service and minimized call transfers while simultaneously improving employee onboarding. With 300 contact center agents (at 25 new agents in each onboarding class) serving 900,000 members, VyStar had a unique opportunity to partner with technology experts like Posh to achieve both goals. Since Posh’s inception in December 2022, VyStar has:

• Saved over 22,000 hours in call handle time
• Cut employee onboarding by four times and employee turnover by a factor of three
• Reduced transfer rates by 100,000 total calls 
• Provided assistance to over 90,000 inquiries via the website 

“Posh provides a tremendous opportunity to enhance the way we do business because of how many member interactions we have,” explains VyStar’s VP of member experience support systems Corey Kreuter. “And we’ve changed our onboarding practice almost entirely.”

Phasing in Voice Assistant, Phasing Out the Phone Menu

Kreuter’s team approached Posh’s deployment very strategically. They needed to balance containment and member satisfaction, while improving onboarding and new hire training, which had a ten-month ramp time. They rolled out Posh’s Voice Assistant product in phases, testing the product and ensuring members adopted the change and became confident in the new system. In addition, they deployed Posh’s Digital Assistant on the website to provide 24/7 self-serve, eliminating the need to call.  

Over the course of ten months, Kreuter and his team leveraged Posh’s intelligent routing and self-serve capabilities to gradually replace traditional phone menu options with Voice Assistant:

• Member services launched in December to manage non-specific calls, such as checking account balances or asking specific account questions.
• Basic transactions followed in February
• Digital services, such as online, mobile, and bill pay, launched in June
• Consumer lending services followed in July
• Questions pertaining to cards, such as reporting a lost or stolen card or requesting a replacement card, came online in September

“We didn’t want to throw our membership a huge curveball,” explains Kreuter. “By taking out individual menu options, we were able to test and get the results we were looking for without shaking things up too much for our membership.”

As each phase rolled out, VyStar added custom call flows and SMS messaging to improve the caller experience. The Assistant answers frequently asked questions over the phone, while providing an option to send additional information through SMS messages. If a member needs to speak to an expert, the Assistant passes the full context and call transcripts along to the right agent so they can easily continue the conversation. 

“It has been so eye opening to see how eloquently Voice Assistant can handle so many of these simple questions,” says Kreuter. 

Improving Onboarding & Retaining Employees

Posh’s Voice Assistant doesn’t only improve the experience for members. VyStar has completely overhauled its onboarding and training program to empower new hires. Before Posh, new hires would take a six-week training program that Kreuter described as “long and arduous.” After completing the program, new hires had difficulty retaining information they learned in their first week, which impacted the way they could service members.

With Posh, VyStar has implemented a modular-based strategy, in which new hires are trained on one discipline and Voice Assistant’s intelligent routing sends callers asking about that discipline to the new hires. 

“We start new hires on something introductory, like the fundamentals,” explains Kreuter. “They can take calls for a week at a time on that discipline, creating a ‘learn, do’ model. It’s been very transformative.” 

In less than a year’s time, VyStar has seen dramatic improvement in their onboarding and retention. The time it takes for a new hire to get to the average handle time of an expert is four times faster, decreasing from a year to a mere four months. And employee turnover from the training process has improved by a factor of three. As a result of the Assistant’s ability to intelligently route calls, VyStar has seen reduced transfer rates between departments by 100,000 calls since inception. 

“Our training process is no longer intimidating, it’s easier to grasp, and allows our employees to feel more empowered to do a great job,” says Kreuter. “With this new model, we can serve members faster and lower handle times. And, we can show tangible results to our business partners to get buy-in. It’s a win-win for our team and our members.”

Continuing to Scale

Looking to the future, VyStar will continue to scale with Posh until they can sunset the legacy bank-by-phone and integrate into the core banking system. Because of the radical improvements in the business through onboarding and call transfers thanks to Posh’s intelligent routing capability, Kreuter is confident in the team’s ability to continue deployment and refinement along the way.

“Eventually, Posh will take over the main menu,” says Kreuter. “They’ve been so impactful for the way we can do business and the impact it has for our members.”

Vystar is also considering the expansion of leveraging Posh’s AI Digital Assistant within online and mobile and Knowledge Assistant within the contact center, helping employees obtain answers quickly, decreasing average handle times.

Want to get the same results? Check out Posh's Voice Assistant →