The pandemic’s evolving consumer expectations of financial institutions also greatly accelerated those businesses' digital transformation objectives. Perhaps so more for collections than other lines of business. This customer, a Top 10 U.S. bank, 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 and applied remotely with a year-long timetable amidst a pandemic.

In a three-phase rollout over 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 the underlying architecture. Despite the overhaul to the agent workspace, NPS remains consistent, and call handling time only incurred slight increases during onboarding. Just one month after migration, conversion and payment rates are higher than the legacy platform, translating to tens of millions of dollars of additional revenue annually. Evidence also suggests agents who embraced the new offer experience improved their enrollment and credit outcomes even more than their peers.

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 that 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, the scope was immediately defined end-to-end, and many months that could otherwise have been lost to product decision-making, priorities, and trade-offs were instead focused on speed to market. Key principles for migration included:

• No new functionality; a migrated product would be a parity feature-for-feature
• Functionality could be redesigned to adapt to new UX patterns, and information architecture, or to eliminate tech debt
• Prioritized build toward highest volume features first, then iterated development

Within weeks, not months, new agents transitioned to the new platform with similar call handling 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. All in all, 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.

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.