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In 2019, following the rollout of a new customer portal that gave greater visibility to the Customer Relationship Center phone numbers, Crédit Agricole Nord de France saw a sharp increase in inbound contact volumes. Between 2019 and 2020, these volumes doubled or even tripled depending on the period, representing an overall increase close to 200%.
This surge led to a drop in the call answer rate, from 80-85% down to 40-50%. Despite an initial internal reorganization that helped recover around 15 points, the answer rate remained too low, directly impacting service quality and the teams’ ability to handle the volume.
At Crédit Agricole Nord de France, remote customer service is built on a multichannel organization and a dense network of 239 branches across the Nord and Pas-de-Calais regions. Around one hundred employees are involved in customer relationship activities, across both branches and the Customer Relationship Center (CRC).
Customers can contact their bank via a shared phone number, supported by a natural language IVR, which routes calls either to the branch or to the CRC depending on the need. Dedicated CRC numbers, available on the website, complete the setup, along with emails and chats managed through the New Customer Portal.
With call volumes rising sharply, especially on the phone channel, the need to better qualify requests and redirect certain reasons for contact to more suitable journeys became essential, particularly when customer self-service can provide a simpler and faster response without compromising access to advisory services.
In this context, Crédit Agricole Nord de France chose to integrate a Visual IVR to structure inbound calls and offer alternatives to the voice channel whenever relevant.
Crédit Agricole Nord de France deployed DialOnce’s visual IVR across all of its phone lines to offer alternatives to traditional voice calls.
The decision was made not to replicate existing journeys, but to start from real customer behaviors and needs. Internal teams analyzed call reasons, wrote all scenarios, and identified, case by case, when self-care truly added value for customers, without deprioritizing advisory support when it was needed (for example, for simple requests such as issuing a certificate).
The solution was part of a broader reachability initiative launched in spring 2020, with go-live in early September. From deployment onward, the impact was immediate.
"We gained 34 points of reachability where we had initially hoped for 15-20 points. This has enabled us to rediscover our ability to make outgoing calls. We used to suffer our calls: today, thanks to DialOnce, we've been able to regain serenity in our teams."
Laurent Graziani
Head of the Customer Relations Center, Retail Market, Crédit Agricole Nord de France
If you would like to learn more, the full interview with Laurent Graziani, Director of the Customer Relationship Center for the Retail Banking segment at Crédit Agricole Nord de France, is available below via the drop-down menu. He shares more details on the initial need, the project rollout, and the results achieved.
Successful deployment of Visual IVR at Crédit Agricole Nord de France by DialOnce
Laurent Graziani, Director of the Customer Relationship Center for the Retail Market at Crédit Agricole Nord de France (CANDF), shares the circumstances that led to the deployment of the DialOnce Visual IVR. He provides an overview of the solution: from its implementation, the results achieved, and the prospects for 2021.
I'm Laurent Graziani, head of the customer relations center for the retail market at Crédit Agricole Nord de France. I manage a team of 60 people on site in Lambersart, and we have a second site in Arras for pro and agris customers. Around a hundred people work on remote customer relations.
We deal with our customers' telephone calls on a common number for all customers, and we also have specific CRC numbers on our website where customers can reach us without going through the branch.
We also manage our customers' e-mails on the New Customer Portal (NPC) and CRC chats.
We have a very dense network compared with other banks. We have 239 branches in the Nord and Pas de Calais regions. We're determined to stay close to our customers in both rural and urban areas.
We have a common number for all branches: an AVI with natural language. Depending on what the customer says, he or she will be redirected to the agency or the CRC.
For all non-working hours (HNO) at the branch, the CRC has a wider range of hours, enabling customers to speak to a dedicated contact person, from 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday, and from 8am to 6pm on Saturdays.
In addition, our customers can browse the NPC website and contact us directly, depending on their needs. For insurance, we have a specific insurance number that reaches the Customer Relations Center. Similarly, for day-to-day banking or consumer services, calls can be directed to the Customer Relations Center.
We are organized by division, each with its own specialties.
In April 2019, CANDF rolled out a new customer portal on which the telephone numbers of the customer relations center were given particular prominence. This had the effect of considerably increasing (x2 or even x3) the volume of calls without us having the human resources to absorb it.
The pick-up rate deteriorated between April 2019 and April 2020. An internal reorganization enabled us to improve this rate by 15 points, but it wasn't enough. We therefore decided to implement DialOnce Visual IVR.
I'd heard about DialOnce at a Customer Relationship Center club within Crédit Agricole and thought it might be a good time to try and develop selfcare. I approached DialOnce in February 2020. And DialOnce was involved in a "reachability" project delivered in April 2020, in a context of low pick-up rates and high call volumes, 2 to 3 times higher than those of other caisses. We had to reduce this volume. So we implemented the DialOnce Visual IVR.
We didn't want to copy and paste what existed in other caisses, so we set up a working group. We wanted to start from our needs, not from the solution. We preferred to take the time to write down all possible scenarios, to sound out calls, to determine why customers call us, so as to respond in the best possible way with a solution geared towards self-care when it's useful for the customer (for example, I want to edit a certificate, I don't need an advisor to send it to me, maybe I can do it on my own).
For each scenario, we asked ourselves how useful selfcare would be for the customer, without deprioritizing customer advice. At the beginning of September, we put the DialOnce solution into production, and the effect was immediate!
From the end of September to the end of November, we improved the overall pick-up rate for the entire CRC. In 2 and a half months, we gained 20 points in our pick-up rate thanks to the DialOnce solution:
On the one hand, some customers have chosen to manage their requests autonomously, which means fewer calls on the CRC.
Secondly, our call repetition rate has mechanically decreased. Customers who used to call us 2 or 3 times a day with the DialOnce solution have found the solution to their problem. As a result, we have significantly reduced our call volume.
Historically, the solution had been selected to relieve congestion in the "insurance" department, where we had the most calls. Between the implementation of DialOnce and the end of November within the insurance division, we significantly improved the pick-up rate.
We've gained 34 points where we'd hoped for 15 or 20. As a reminder, in April 2020 we were stalling at 40%. This has been invaluable for us, as it has freed up time for proactivity and enabled us to rediscover our ability to make outbound calls.
We used to suffer from our calls. What we've regained in our teams is a new-found pleasure in their work. Our team members used to take over 100 calls a day! This number has now been reduced to 40-50 incoming calls, which means we can now make an average of twenty outgoing calls per team member every day.
DialOnce has enabled us to regain a sense of serenity.
The keystone of our corporate project at caisse level is really to improve reachability. This means not only reducing the number of calls to the CRC, but also improving the way our branches handle them, while at the same time changing the way we manage branch flows. We want to create a completely different way of handling calls. We're currently testing an overflow between several branches in the same sector for taking calls.
We're going to implement DialOnce at the end of the chain: first, we'll go through an overflow between advisers, and if the call doesn't go through, rather than having an answering machine, DialOnce will take over. The project is currently being tested in a few agency groups.
In addition, in terms of management, we have dashboards that we didn't have before for telephony, which helps us to better manage this area.
We're going to strengthen our remote relations. The COVID period was a full-scale test, and working remotely has shaken up the habits of both our customers and our advisors. In fact, we're going to set up a remote relations school to better support our advisors on a day-to-day basis.
Crédit Agricole's clearly stated aim is to become No. 1 in terms of customer satisfaction. Our advisors' accessibility is therefore a key priority for our Regional Bank.
We're at the stage where the solution is working well on the CRC. We made an initial update at the end of September due to a disappointing click rate on the SMS link sent out. Only half the customers clicked on the SMS. Perhaps the message recorded on the IVR wasn't precise enough, and the SMS received was scary. Fear of fishing, for example.
So we reworked the voice message and SMS content with our DialOnce Customer Success Manager. We allocated a few hours to this and put the new version into production at the end of September. Immediately, we went from a 50% click-through rate to a 70% rate, which has been maintained over time. It's worth continuing to work on the details of the customer journey. That was a first victory.
The next step will be to explore the full range of scenarios. Why is this or that path not used by the customer? We'll be taking the time to do this in Q1 2021, to further improve reachability and make it even easier for customers to find the solution to their problem.
As we are trained in the tool, we are autonomous in making modifications, which are instantly put into production.
I've had a very good experience with the team, right from the start. Our discussions are always excellent. Customer service is very satisfactory in terms of responsiveness, availability and proximity. The support was necessary at the start-up and is still there.
For example, today we're planning a qualitative satisfaction survey that goes beyond the very good figures. We're going to question customers who receive the SMS without clicking on it, and customers who stop the process without consulting their solution.
We contacted DialOnce to obtain the information we needed to carry out this study. The tool was delivered within 15 days. And our CSM contact, DialOnce, made our work easier by proposing suitable scenarios for the surveys.
DialOnce was a great experience.
