For almost a century, NATIONAL-BANK has been building close, personal relationships with the citizens and businesses it serves. And now—with the help of the latest, cloud-based speech recognition tools—the bank is empowering its consultants to nurture stronger connections than ever.
Headquartered in Essen, NATIONAL-BANK is one of Germany’s leading regional banks. Throughout its long history, it has provided financial services founded on local expertise, independent advice, and—perhaps most important of all—close, personal relationships with its private and commercial customers.
Like many institutions, NATIONAL-BANK has embarked on digitization initiatives to reflect changing times and evolving customer expectations. But even as it has embraced digital technologies, the bank has been careful to protect the relationships that set it apart—balancing innovations in self-service with innovations in service delivery.
One essential step has been to lighten its consultants’ administrative load. A high-contact approach to relationships naturally creates a high volume of documentation. Traditionally, NATIONAL-BANK employees would spend much of each working day recording minutes from their client meetings, creating client credit statements, or performing company analyses.
An inspired solution, from an unexpected source
All this changed when a member of the bank’s Executive Board visited his lawyer—and discovered professional speech recognition technology. Seeing how much time the lawyer was able to save by dictating notes directly into his computer, he also immediately saw the potential to transform NATIONAL-BANK’s internal operations.
Seeking a solution appropriate for a financial services environment, the bank settled on Nuance Dragon Professional Anywhere. As Marco Weyland, head of the organization at NATIONAL-BANK, explains, “Nuance’s technologies are particularly well suited for use in the financial world because they meet the highest security requirements through encryption and local data processing.”
A small-scale pilot quickly proved the potential impact; Nuance Dragon Professional Anywhere would only need to save NATIONAL-BANK’s employees a few minutes each day – effectively to pay for itself. Marco identified everyone who could benefit from speech recognition and rolled the solution out to over 100 users.
Putting speech recognition into practice
“We’re now using Nuance Dragon to optimize the documentation of our customer interviews,” says Marco. “After every appointment, our consultants must capture what was discussed and what actions were agreed to. With Nuance Dragon Professional Anywhere, they can dictate straight into our CRM—saving them time and allowing them to spend more time with our customers.”
Because most of us speak three times faster than we type, the time savings possible with professional cloud-based speech recognition technology can be huge. “We’ve had a lot of positive feedback from our users,” says Marco. “Some praise the noticeable increase in efficiency, others the user-friendliness of the software. Some are simply happy that they don’t have to bend over their keyboard all day.”
NATIONAL-BANK’s consultants find even more ways to be productive
Many NATIONAL-BANK consultants are already using Dragon to accelerate other time-consuming tasks, like composing lengthy customer communications. And as Marco explains, there have even been some wholly unexpected use cases. “We’ve given Nuance Dragon to employees who have broken their arms or fingers,” he says. “They’ve been thankful for the opportunity to keep working, and they’ve continued to use the technology after they’ve recovered.”
Another convert to dictation? Marco himself – since overseeing the bank’s implementation of Nuance Dragon Professional Anywhere, he’s become a bonafide power user. “I use Nuance Dragon for daily tasks, like answering emails and creating strategy papers,” he explains. “I’ll also use its voice commands to open emails or Microsoft Word. It’s easy, and there’s the ergonomic advantage of being able to work without being at your desk.”
Giving Nuance Dragon the language of NATIONAL-BANK
Nuance Dragon Professional Anywhere transcribes speech with up to 99 percent accuracy, “out of the box.” It continues to automatically learn its user’s voice to become more accurate over time.
Even so, every business has a unique vocabulary. And NATIONAL-BANK was no different. The company was quick to customize its solution’s dictionary, adding each of its employees’ names. Nuance Dragon Professional Anywhere makes such customization easy; administrators make the change centrally and then push the update out to individual users, user groups, or the entire business.
Manage the change, maximize the benefits
If you are excited about the potential of cloud-based speech recognition to transform your own business’s operations, Marco has some excellent final advice. “Nuance Dragon Professional Anywhere is a great solution. Just remember that, as always, some users may worry about mastering a new way of working. Take the time to manage the change, train your users, and set them up for success. The more they use Nuance Dragon Professional Anywhere, the greater the benefit for your business.”