IncredibleBank leads by embracing innovative personalization and cutting-edge AI tools

IncredibleBank began its journey in 1967 under the name River Valley Bank, with its first branch in Rothschild, WI. Since then, the bank has expanded to 16 locations across Wisconsin and Michigan’s upper peninsula, and today has even extended its reach into southwest Florida.

With a name like IncredibleBank, the bank understands they have a lot to live up to – like the need for a competitive drive, a focus on innovation, and high expectations. And according to Philip Suckow, Vice President of Innovation, Jack Henry’s suite of solutions has been instrumental in their quest for all three. From digital banking platforms to AI-driven customer service, the bank has harnessed the latest tools to reinforce and enhance how they live up to their name through every accountholder interaction.

“In today’s competitive landscape, we know we can’t afford to look only to other financial institutions to set our service benchmarks,” Suckow comments. “We continue to look across the retail landscape to find ways to improve our customer experience. Jack Henry™ solutions have provided us with powerful tools that allow us to drive innovation and growth via personalization and efficiency.”

embracing personalization

With an eye toward giants like Amazon and Netflix, and how they’ve mastered the art of customized recommendations, IncredibleBank has embraced the challenge of meeting consumer expectations for custom ads. They understand that people expect ads to be timely and relevant. That’s why they’ve made personalization an important part of their messaging strategy.

In late 2023, the bank began testing Banno’s ability to send push notifications to specific customer segments, utilizing personalized messaging as part of a campaign to increase Autobooks adoption. After researching industries that would most benefit from the product, IncredibleBank sent personalized messages to customers in those industries.

“Those messages – including custom push notifications, subject lines, and copy relevant to the audiences – resulted in a 12% overall conversion rate,” reports Suckow, “with up to a 23% conversion rate in certain industries.”

boosting efficiency through AI

IncredibleBank has also combined Jack Henry’s Banno Conversations and Google Gemini AI to allow their call center to leverage the content on website, their brand voice, and proprietary AI technology to deliver customer service enhancements.
As of today, 50% of all Banno Conversations at IncredibleBank have an AI-suggested response incorporated into the customer conversation. But this isn’t your average AI chatbot. The IncredibleBank-customized AI pulls language from their website and internal brand guide to generate responses, ensuring reply suggestions are on-brand, accurate, and fast.

Suckow shared a scenario of a customer who used Banno Conversations to ask a question about how to sign up for eStatements. “Before we utilized AI, one of our bankers would look up the process and manually type in a response, taking about three minutes. But now with AI, within about 30 seconds an AI- suggestion populates for the banker with step-by-step instructions pulled directly from our website.”

“This generative AI also develops a summary of 70% of our bank’s chats,” he notes.
The banks then adds these summaries as notes in their Synapsys customer relationship management solution, providing visibility about issues, questions, or complaints for their entire customer-facing team.

IncredibleBank utilizes AI as a Spanish-language translator for chat as well. “Combined with our use of Banno’s Spanish language application interface, we are able to better communicate with our customers,” explains Suckow. “We’ve been able to use AI in 100% of our incoming messages from Spanish-speaking customers, eliminating extra steps to translate and improving the time it takes to answer customer questions by around 30%.”

Spanish translation also helped the bank recently work with two native Spanish speaking customers who were trying to send money to each other. “Our customer experience representative who helped them is not a Spanish speaker,” says Suckow. “But by using AI translation, the employee was able to facilitate the payment.”

He continues, “Before AI, when a Spanish conversation started, our agents would have had to switch between different systems, and the conversations could take 15 minutes or more to complete. In this case, our employee was able to streamline the translation process and meet the customers’ needs within 10 minutes of the conversation being initiated.”

award-winning innovation

In recognition of their creative use of technology to elevate the experience for their customers and employees, IncredibleBank was named one of the first-ever recipients of the Jack Henry Cobalt Awards in The Changemaker category.

This new annual award recognizes financial institutions for exceptional accomplishments in leveraging technology, services, and innovation to enhance operational efficiency, advance business practices, and boost both user experience and staff productivity.

delivering changemaking experiences

With a strong commitment to every interaction, IncredibleBank continues to focus on improving the experience of their customers and employees.

“These individual anecdotes are just a small sample of the kind of effect strong personalization and improved efficiency we gain by leveraging Jack Henry’s suite of tools with an eye on improved customer experience, Suckow observes. “We can also continue to achieve our mission of growing our customers’ entire financial relationships.”