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success story

Smarter support with AI delivers millions in savings

A leading global bank, with a presence in 160 countries and 94 markets, needed to scale up its customer support operations to handle over 200 million annual interactions—without compromising experience or increasing agent costs. With low containment rates and rising abandonment, its existing platform struggled to keep up. The bank partnered with Virtusa to transform the contact center into a high-performance, AI-powered support ecosystem—achieving 68% containment and delivering millions in annual cost savings.

KEY TECHNOLOGIES AND PLATFORMS
  • NLP optimization and conversational engine tuning 
  • GenAI-powered intent recognition 
  • Voice bot development for complex task execution 
  • AI-driven product recommendation engine 
  • Contextual search integration for agent assist (SmartAssist) 
  • Linguistic analysis and training data augmentation

When every call became a cost center

For millions of customers of this leading global bank, getting answers to even routine queries like “How do I reset my password?” or “Where’s my refund?” was a frustrating experience. Long hold times, prolonged call durations, and agents manually retrieving information from outdated systems led to dissatisfaction for callers and rising service costs for the bank.

With over 200 million inbound calls annually across 20 million customers, the contact center was under immense pressure to perform. Its underlying systems weren’t built for today’s scale or complexity. The legacy conversational platform struggled to understand intent, often misrouted queries, or failed to respond effectively, resulting in a containment rate below 15%. These inefficiencies led to:

  • High abandonment rates 
  • Increased average handle time (AHT) 
  • Costly escalations to live agents 
  • Stagnant customer satisfaction scores 

Agents were burdened with repetitive queries, limited context, and disconnected systems, leaving little room for high-value interactions or proactive resolution. The bank needed to pivot from reactive service to intelligent, real-time support. That required more than new tools; it demanded a smarter, AI-driven foundation.

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>200M

calls handled per year

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<15%

conversation containment rate

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The AI-led transformation delivered tangible improvements across the bank’s contact center—reducing costs, improving service efficiency, and enabling better experiences for agents and customers alike.

An AI-led shift to intelligent customer engagement

To turn its contact center into a driver of customer satisfaction and cost efficiency, the bank partnered with Virtusa. As a strategic transformation partner, Virtusa reimagined the entire support experience with an AI-powered solution that enhanced containment, reduced handling time, and eased the burden on live agents, without compromising service quality.

At the core was a reengineered conversational engine built on Generative AI (genAI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) accelerators—trained on real call transcripts and integrated seamlessly with the bank’s existing systems. Virtusa’s solution embedded task-specific AI agents that could recognize customer intent, respond contextually, and escalate only when necessary.

Key AI-driven enhancements included:

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Conversational engine optimization:
Virtusa redesigned the bank’s existing platform to improve intent recognition, enabling the system to understand, route, and resolve a broader range of queries without human intervention.

GenAI-powered interaction handling:
SmartAssist capabilities were upgraded to generate human-like responses, ask clarifying questions, and tailor replies based on real-time context.

Contextual data retrieval:
AI agents were integrated with back-end systems to pull relevant customer data—like transaction history, status updates, and policy details—within seconds, reducing call time and improving first-contact resolution.

Dynamic escalation logic:
The system intelligently determined when to escalate to a live agent based on complexity, sentiment, or regulatory risk— ensuring human support was focused where it mattered most.

AI agent orchestration:
Multiple task-specific AI agents worked in sync to handle end-to-end conversations, from authentication to resolution, streamlining the entire interaction flow.

 

Together, these enhancements transformed the contact center from a high-volume, high-cost operation into a more responsive support function, capable of handling millions of interactions with speed, accuracy, and empathy.

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Where conversations deliver measurable returns

The AI-led transformation delivered tangible improvements across the bank’s contact center—reducing costs, improving service efficiency, and enabling better experiences for agents have customers alike. Key outcomes included:

  • 68% call containment (up from less than 15%), easing pressure on agent teams and improving first-contact resolution 
  • Millions of dollars in annual cost savings from fewer escalations and shorter calls
  • 20% reduction in average handle time (AHT), driven by better data access and faster query routing 
  • Higher customer satisfaction, with shorter wait times and more consistent answers 
  • Improved agent productivity, with more time to focus on complex or sensitive issues 

Beyond the operational gains, the solution laid the groundwork for continuous improvement, making it easier for the bank to respond to evolving customer needs.

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From first gains to future focus

The early results spoke for themselves: higher containment, shorter calls, and better customer satisfaction. These improvements were driven by targeted enhancements—better routing, faster resolution paths, and tighter integration with legacy systems. Backed by deep domain expertise and experience in modernizing large-scale contact centers, Virtusa helped the bank move from automating for efficiency to designing for better customer experiences—validating the strengths that had shaped the partnership from the start. Building on this momentum, the bank is now focused on extending intelligence across more support channels—including mobile, chat, and voice—to unify customer experiences and enable faster, real-time service. The goal: a consistent, intent-aware support system that adapts to customer needs, regardless of where the conversation begins.

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68%

call containment 

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20%

reduction in average
handle time

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