Hudson Valley Credit Union Cuts Speed of Answer 30% and Abandonment Rate 51% With Rapid Voice Verification

By Illuma
September 27, 2023

HVCU was faced with the need to reduce average handle time (AHT) without harming member experience or account security. Instead of picking one or two types of calls that could potentially be handled faster, the organization wanted to make improvements across the board. According to Steve Goodwine, vice president, director of Contact Center, member verification stood out as an obvious area to target. “One thing that we do on every phone call, regardless of the reason for the call, is identify the person calling. That’s an area we targeted so we could make large improvements across the entire spectrum of phone calls.”

The benefits of frictionless voice authentication were immediate and obvious. Goodwine shared the key metric impacting average handle time: “Our caller verification used to take about 60 seconds. We’re at 17.1 seconds on Illuma Shield™️ today and that number keeps shrinking as machine learning keeps improving the system.” Just 10 months after deployment, the Illuma Shield system is already seeing over 2X higher adoption compared to what the credit union’s previous PIN-based authentication service was able to achieve after five years of use.

Key benefits:

• 71% decrease in time to authenticate
• 30% decrease in average speed of answer
• 51% decrease in abandon rate
• 1,400+ FTE hours saved in first six months
• 2X+ higher adoption in 10 months than previous method had in five years
• Net promoter score at three-year high

About Illuma

Illuma, a Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO), specializes in voice authentication software that replaces traditional knowledge-based authentication practices in call centers. Illuma provides frictionless voice authentication and fraud prevention for credit union contact centers to substantially reduce call handle times, improve member experience, and increase account security. 

The company’s platform, Illuma Shield™, continuously analyzes the unique characteristics of the speaker’s voice and calling device using state-of-the-art Signal Processing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. This proprietary voice authentication system rapidly and seamlessly validates the identity of callers during natural conversation without requiring security Q&A or spoken password phrases.