Cassandra Aeichele loves chatting with people. She’s just one of those people who makes you feel at ease as soon as she starts talking. So, it’s probably not surprising that Aeichele is serving customers across Canada as a contact centre representative at TD.
It’s a job perfectly suited to a person like Aeichele. Contact centre representatives respond quickly and accurately to a wide range of questions covering a range of topics, from opening a Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) to buying a Guaranteed Investment Certificate (GIC). The position requires skills that you can’t learn overnight.
Aeichele started working for TD as a customer experience associate in St. Thomas, Ont., about a two-hour drive west from Toronto. But about a year after Aeichele started working at the branch, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It turned out to be one of the best things that happened to Aeichele in her career.
“There was now a need for more specialists on the phone side of things, and I was able to bring the skills and knowledge I had gained from the branch to the TD EasyLine team,” Aeichele said. “Being part of such a fast-paced environment was, and still is, exciting.”
Embracing change is all part of what Aeichele and her colleagues do every day. So, when Aeichele and her teammates were asked to test and then use a new Gen AI-powered application designed to help colleagues respond to customer queries with greater speed and accuracy, she was game.
“It really does a lot to make my job easier,” she said. “And it helps me support our customers more efficiently.”
The AI-powered tool helping TD contact centre representatives
In 2024, TD introduced a generative AI virtual assistant that it designed to help contact centre representatives answer client questions faster than they could before.
When they don’t know the answers to customers’ questions about everyday banking, they can retrieve them in seconds by asking the virtual assistant. The underlying knowledge management capability, developed by Layer 6, the Bank’s AI research and development centre, was trained to have an understanding of the Bank’s policies and procedures.
Agents can prompt the virtual assistant with questions such as: “What does a customer need to do if they lose their debit card overseas?” It scans TD customer policy and procedure materials and provides responses in summarized, conversational language to colleagues. The platform also includes citations to the specific policies and procedures it used to source its answers so that agents can verify the accuracy of every answer.
It does all of this in seconds, significantly decreasing call hold times and call transfers to other specialized support teams. Aeichele is now one of more than 1,000 contact centre representatives using generative AI every day to help create a legendary experience for TD customers.
Previously, Aeichele relied on dozens of open tabs on her desktop to ensure she could respond to her customers in a timely fashion. Now, thanks to the new platform, she uses a simple search bar to type in a query, and all the TD materials she needs are immediately at her fingertips.
“Instead of having to navigate several sites on my computer screen, click by click, I can simply type in a question, and I get all the answers,” Aeichele said. “This saves me time on my call, so I can help my customers quickly.”
Layer 6 helping lead the AI revolution at TD
Aeichele and her colleagues are at the forefront of the generative AI revolution at TD.
Developers at Layer 6 worked closely with colleagues with subject matter expertise within TD contact centres to create the custom application. It is a deeply collaborative undertaking involving cross-functional teams, mountains of data and rigorous testing.
Layer 6 engineers trained a generative AI model to develop an understanding of TD policies and procedures related to everyday banking and to accurately answer questions about them. They used an AI framework called retrieval augmented generation to anchor the model on these policies and ensure that it could only use them to develop its answers.
The virtual assistant was first rolled out to a limited number of colleagues in early 2024. TD began by piloting the technology with resource agents, experienced colleagues in contact centres who are well-versed in TD policies and procedures and assist clients with more complex issues.
In the pilot, TD was able to reduce call hold times by 15%. Following the pilot, TD began to roll the technology out to front-line specialists like Aeichele.
Over the coming months, the team at Layer 6 will be gathering information about the performance of this application from Aeichele and her colleagues as Layer 6 continues to refine and build the next generation of Gen AI tools designed to help improve the banking experience for TD customers.
“If we can use AI tools like this to help us do our job better, and clients can still have that human interaction they want, then it’s easier for everybody,” Aeichele said.
Learn more about innovation at TD here.