Founded in 1953, Umpqua Bank started providing financial services for a timber community near the South Umpqua River in Oregon. As the community flourished, the bank grew and eventually spread to seven more states. While the bank has expanded, including a recent merger with Columbia Bank, it has never lost sight of its original mission: ‘People should always come first.’
Beyond simply providing digital-first customer service options, such as online chat, it was important for Umpqua Bank to continue building and reinforcing customer relationships through all interactions. The vision was to “create a personalized approach and really understand what customers need and what their journey is in terms of their financial success,” says EVP of Global Payments and Deposits, Kathryn Albright. So, it was vital to make it easy for customers to reach out for human support when needed.
The bank was early to embrace online support, providing customer service through its digital properties already back in 2017, with a solution it called ‘Go-To.’ This service provided a 1:1 relationship for customers with bankers, aligning with Umpqua Bank’s ‘people-first’ mission, but it wasn’t live support with responses often coming the following day. As customer behavior and expectations were changing, the bank needed to evolve its solution and provide real-time support.
Chat was important for customers, but Umpqua Bank knew that it needed more digital-first options and the ability to align with evolving customer expectations. “We were looking for a vendor that would take our Go-To service to the next level and satisfy our vision. The features offered by Glia allowed us to do that. Plus, Glia’s strong relationship with Q2, our online banking platform, enabled a smooth launch and a proven solution,” said Lauren Livick, Digital Product Manager, Global Payments and Deposits.
The Glia Interaction Platform has provided the bank with a ChannelLess™ solution including, chat, OnScreen Voice, and collaborative CoBrowsing, with the ability to easily transition across channels for a seamless customer experience. This allows Umpqua Bank to “turn on” more interaction options over time, as customer and business needs require it.
Using a ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach with the Glia solution, Umpqua Bank satisfied its goal of taking its Go-To platform to the next level and achieving its vision to fully understand the customer journey. The bank purposefully tested and iterated to finetune the optimal way to digitally interact with its customers. It first tested it with bank employees and family, then rolled it out in groups of 5,000 customers to verify controls and processes. Umpqua also took learnings from the retail banking rollout which made the commercial rollout significantly more efficient. Today, digital banking, commercial & consumer lending, treasury services as well as the fraud department are all using the Glia Interaction Platform.
This digital-first approach has yielded impressive results. From 2018 to 2022, loan dollars attributed to the digital channel grew by 511%, while the number of loans grew by 245%. In the same period, account openings via the digital branch surged by 980%, demonstrating the effectiveness of Umpqua's digital strategy.
Initially, Umpqua Bank used its specialized team of bankers to interact with customers through Glia’s solution. Yet, the bank found out that many of the inquiries coming in were routine and didn’t need to be handled by an expert banker. So, it added support staff to handle those simple interactions and even provide assistance in other areas, such as online banking. When more in-depth support was needed, they could easily transfer directly to a more experienced banker. This approach allowed Umpqua Bank to efficiently and effectively help its customers while optimizing the staffing mix. These seamless transitions also provided opportunities for upselling while relationship building.
CoBrowsing has allowed the service team to visually guide customers through more complicated activities, such as opening an account. This visual context and customer collaboration led to one of its bankers opening 112 new accounts in just one month.
Learning and iterating to find the best way to serve its customers have delivered impactful results and enhanced customer experience simultaneously for Umpqua Bank. For instance, the average wait time for retail customers fell to 74 seconds and the average speed of answer dropped to 28 seconds for its commercial customers, delighting customers and creating greater efficiency. Moreover, using Glia, Umpqua saw a reduction of 90% in average wait time, 24% in average handle time, and 45% in abandonment rate versus the phone-only channel.
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Not only was Umpqua Bank looking to unify its digital communications to provide an optimal customer experience, but it was also going through a merger with Columbia Bank. While some banks would have hesitated to upgrade technology during such a pivotal time, having Glia’s solution allowed the bank to accommodate new customers from Columbia Bank more easily and efficiently. As Lauren Livick, Digital Product Manager, Global Payments and Deposits notes, “It couldn’t have come at a better time.”
With increased call volumes due to the merger, the Glia solution provided another way for customers to interact and relieve some of the call volume. On the business side alone, the number of chats rose more than eightfold. Questions around the merger could quickly be answered while providing any information specific to the online banking site. When it was challenging to understand specific customer needs through chat, Umpqua Bank staff could offer CoBrowsing to collaborate on screen or upgrade to OnScreen Voice. CoBrowing has been tremendously helpful in guiding new customers through Umpqua Bank’s online banking site and successfully converting them.
Umpqua Bank continues to serve its customers at the highest level and advance its digital communications to do so effectively. The bank has already implemented an AI-enabled virtual assistant, which delivers after-hours consumer banking support. Next up: an AI-enabled operator assistant and asynchronous secure messaging to further provide banking services when and how customers need them. Partnering with Glia enables the best customer experience, evolving as expectations shift. Keeping the customer at the center of everything it does is how Umpqua Bank makes a strong impact and continues to thrive.
