Top 10 U.S. Bank
Migrating Thousands of Contact Center Agents off 15+-Year-Old Legacy Platform in 18 Months.
A revolving Ippon client and Top 10 U.S. Bank engaged Ippon to accelerate the migration off of a 15+-year-old legacy platform supporting thousands of contact center agents. An extended contract and teams-in-a-box approach was applied at a ratio of 4-to-1, supplementing in-house engineering. The teams iteratively delivered over 12 months on an MVP alongside 12 trailblazer agents. Over the subsequent eight weeks, 100% of the remaining 1,500 collections agents moved to the new platform with little disruption or incident.
KEY FIGURES
The Call
The pandemic’s evolving consumer expectations of financial institutions also greatly accelerated those businesses' digital transformation objectives. Perhaps no line of business more than Collections.
The Bank had started the discussion of rebuilding the contact center platform in 2018. In 2019, discussions progressed to architecture decisions and alignment across several LOBs for a single cross-functional agent channel. General servicing agent migration was planned for 2020, but the priority for Collections changed with a growing need for more flexibility in servicing and a legacy platform full of technical debt.
Already stretched to support migrating 15k core servicing agents, Ippon was engaged to extend support in accelerating the Collections migration. A single in-house team was paired with four contracted teams-in-a-box, applied remotely with a year time-table amidst a pandemic.
The Impact
In a three-phase roll out across eight weeks, we immediately advocated trust in the new agent servicing platform with barely a ripple of disruption.
The new platform delivers a feature-for-feature parity product with minimal functionality change. However, there were significant lifts in modernization to interface and experience design, as well as underlying architecture. Despite the overhaul to the agent workspace, NPS remains consistent and call handle time only incurred slight increases during onboarding. Just one month after migration, conversion and payment rates are higher than the legacy platform, translating tens of millions of dollars of additional revenue annually. Evidence too suggests agents that embraced the new offer experience improved their enrollment and credit outcomes even more than peers.
The Delivery
Key principles for migration included:
- No new functionality; migrated product would be a parity feature-for-feature
- Functionality could be redesigned to adapt to new UX patterns, information architecture, or to eliminate tech debt
- Prioritized build toward highest volume features first, then iterated development
There were plenty of contributors to the successful timing, scope, and seamless migration, but none more so than the guiding principle of “Lift & Shift.”
Given our highest priority was exiting the legacy platform above all else, scope creep was Enemy Number One. By drawing the line for feature enhancements post-migration, scope was immediately defined end-to-end, and many months that could otherwise be lost to product decision-making, priorities, and trade-offs instead focused toward speed to market.
The Result
Within weeks, not months, new agents transitioned to the new platform with similar call handle times, but heightened NPS scores, loyalty, and advocacy. Customer debt collection is up after one month by ~1.5% with ZERO investment in new feature innovation.
It is easy to get bogged down in the "how" or "what" to migrate, and "how much" to modernize along the way. The new agent channel is now home to 5k agents on its way to becoming the single-servicing platform. It will be merging four additional legacy platforms across 10+ lines of business and approximately 20k estimated users.