Nuance once again had an impressive showing at this year’s Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The annual awards recognise the world’s leaders in customer service and contact centres with entries submitted from around the globe. Nuance was recognised with the prestigious Technology Partner of the Year Award, noted for its innovative new solutions and applauded alongside customers for successful deployments.
The annual Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service are an important milestone each year where Nuance and its customers are recognised for their innovation, execution, and commitment to customer service. Having been awarded nearly 50 Stevie Awards in the last decade, Nuance has demonstrated its leadership in evolving the contact centre to meet the needs of consumers with advanced conversational AI.
This year, we congratulate the following customers on their achievements:
ANZ Bank – Silver for Innovation in Customer Service – Financial Services (Nuance VoiceID)
ANZ services over 2 million customers in New Zealand, tasking over 600 of the company’s front-line bankers with handling approximately 4 million inbound calls each year out of its three contact centre locations or remotely—where 70% of the bankers are remote workers. ANZ deployed Nuance Voice ID biometrics technology to authenticate customers and identify fraudsters, reducing authentication time to seconds and allowing customers to self-service. By streamlining processes, Nuance’s biometrics saves 80 seconds per call allowing bankers to serve more customers each day and better manage workloads that have greatly increased at the hands of the pandemic. Almost 50% of ANZ New Zealand’s customers are currently using Voice ID to authenticate their identity when calling the contact centre and Voice ID has increased self-service authentication rates by 10%. Direct customer feedback is that many customers prefer Voice ID because they think it’s easier to use than other methods of authentication.
Nuance Solution: Nuance Biometric Technology
CBA – Bronze for Innovation in Customer Service – Financial Services
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is one of Australia’s leading providers of personal banking, business and institutional banking, and share broking services. CBA has partnered with Nuance over the last five years to build and deliver cutting edge technology solutions to assist customers – including CBA’s innovative virtual assistant, named ‘Ceba’. Since the pandemic had an immense financial impact on most Australians, concerned CBA customers flooded Ceba with sensitive questions, in need of efficient support. Ceba experienced huge peaks during the pandemic fielding more than 1,000 Covid-19 specific inquiries each week. Nuance’s Machine Learning and Conversational AI kept Ceba updated in real-time, training the system to recognise, decipher and answer COVID-specific questions. Ceba understands ~96.8% of customer inquiries and can also instantly triage chats to call centre if the request needs to be escalated, or customers prefer them to be handled by a human customer service agent.
Nuance Solution: Nuance Virtual Assistant
Walgreens – Silver for Most Valuable Response by a Customer Service Team
When the first COVID-19 vaccine was given emergency use authorisation at the end of 2020, appointments were difficult to make, and people had questions around eligibility, safety, and efficacy. Walgreens had information and scheduling capabilities available via its online portal. However, customers were still calling stores at record volumes to find information. This made it difficult for store personnel to focus on other tasks – including getting vaccines into arms. Walgreens turned to Nuance Communications, a leader in conversational AI, to deploy a conversational voicebot that would meet the needs of more customers by extending access to vaccine information and scheduling beyond Walgreens’ web-based portal. After implementation, Walgreens customers could call 1-800-Walgreens or a Walgreens store and speak in English or Spanish to a voicebot to get answers to COVID-19 questions, confirm eligibility according to applicable guidelines, and schedule their vaccine appointments wherever vaccines were available. Nuance’s AI-powered solutions helped Walgreens customers experience a more modern, convenient, and secure process for scheduling their COVID-19 vaccine appointments.
Nuance Solution: Nuance Intelligent Engagement Platform
Wings Financial – Silver for Innovation in Customer Service – Financial Services
Wings Financial Credit Union – Minnesota’s largest credit union – deployed Nuance’s Intelligent Engagement platform and Nuance Gatekeeper to provide members with superior personalised, secure experiences. Through its implementation, Wings Financial offers customers 24/7 virtual assistant support and seamless transitions across communications while supporting service representatives with full-context information, eliminating the need for members to repeat information from prior engagements. Nuance technology also enables Wings to authenticate members swiftly and automatically using AI-enabled biometrics in as little as 5 seconds, with a 99% authentication success rate. As a result, member accounts are better protected, and their requests are conveniently and securely addressed. Since turning to Nuance, Wings Financial has saved 8 hours a day in authentication time, with over 50,000 members enrolled in the voice biometrics program. And the technology is helping answer over 46,000 member requests via Chat, freeing up agents’ time to handle more impactful requests.
Nuance Solutions: Nuance Intelligent Engagement Platform, Nuance Gatekeeper
Deutsche Telekom – Gold for Team of the Year in Customer Service at the German Stevie Awards
Deutsche Telekom (DT) was one of the first German companies to introduce voice biometrics in its contact centre. DT implemented voice biometrics as part of Nuance Gatekeeper and wanted to keep customers safe, but its primary goal was to offer them a simple, friction-free experience. With Gatekeeper, Deutsche Telekom customers create a voiceprint and then get instant access to their account the next time they call in without remembering lengthy ID numbers, and of the 700,000 customers who’ve registered their voiceprint so far, 75% say it’s more convenient.
Nuance Solutions: Nuance Gatekeeper
We take immense pride in the success, enhanced customer experiences and improved ROI our customers achieve using Nuance technology. Our customer partnerships are of utmost importance to our business. That’s why we were excited to also receive a Stevie Award this year for Technology Partner of the Year. Critical to being the best partner is bringing flexible, forward-thinking solutions to our customers. And that’s what we’ve done with Contact Centre AI which we also received a Stevie Award for in the New Contact Centre Solution category, underscoring our investment in providing advanced AI to organisations around in the world.
It’s with honor and gratitude I congratulate our Nuance team for continuing to deliver award-winning solutions and celebrate alongside our customers the strong results those solutions are driving around the globe.
Details about the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service can be found here.
