Ashnik designs a real-time solution to enhance customer experience (CX) for a top bank in India
The Customer:
A leading private sector bank with operations across India, offering a wide range of financial products to corporate and retail customers.
The Challenge:
The bank was using an outdated application for search requests that limited the number of requests getting queued, especially during peak load increasing the overall time taken by the search requests. It led to a bad experience for both the customers and the agents.
The Solution:
Ashnik’s managed services for Elastic Search provided a greatly enhanced customer experience by resolving the timeout issue of customers through horizontal scaling of servers, which increased the number of replicas.
The Benefits:
Ashnik helped in improving the overall performance of the system by increasing the replica shards for the customer. The Bank was excited to have its timeout issue fixed, which its representatives initially faced.
The Customer
A leading private sector bank with operations across India. They offer a wide range of products to corporate and retail customers through retail banking and asset management financial services. The services include net, retail, business, personal banking, and others.
Customer Background
The banking customer depended on an internal application for data collation from various sources and its CRM systems. The Elastic platform was being used to search data from the CRM applications, which were further accessed by the bank’s customer service applications.
Business Challenges
The application faced a time out issue often, leading to search results getting delayed, and in turn hampering the bank’s ability to serve its customers efficiently in real-time. Because the entire process occurred in silos, it needed to be streamlined for efficiency and speed.
Key Challenges
The key technical challenges faced were:
A. Business approval constraint – To get approvals from the customer in terms of users upgrading from the current Elastic 6.8 version to using the Elastic 7.0+ version
B. Cloud Solution – Encryption and decryption with the cloud-based solution did not get administered due to certain business constraints from the customer’s end. Additionally, customers faced timeout issues in relation to the elastic clusters
C. Implementation – There was a cap on procuring beyond a certain number of nodes due to budget constraints
The Solution
Ashnik’s team designed a solution for the customer to streamline and output data on a real-time basis.
The solution enabled an increase in the replica shards over indices which was made possible only through scaling, which is searched frequently and is heavy in size. Which helped in reducing the overall number of timeouts and real-time bottlenecks that occurred from an hour, day, and second perspective.
The Process:
The bank engaged with Ashnik for our open source managed services to bring an improvement to the overall application performance, ensure smoother processes for its agents, and ultimately bettering its end customer experience. Since the interface was difficult to navigate for the agents initially, it led to longer waiting times and slip-ups in resolving the issues of the customers.
Our team analyzed the different roles and assigned each one with the necessary Kibana access to reduce the overall number of search queries on the platform. We helped to clarify, analyze and note specific requirements from the customer to get a better understanding of its user access and then devised a method for the role assigned.
Additionally, we helped tackle parallel performance issues for Kibana and Elastic. All accesses such as alias, index, and the normal Kibana were given to all the users on the platform from the customer’s end who were facing issues earlier. We also helped analyze the various users – a Kibana user, and a Kibana dashboard user and by doing so we understood the various day-to-day requirements and the best steps to follow in terms of optimizing and moving forward to obtain the best solution possible.
The Benefits
Ashnik helped in improving the overall performance of the system by increasing the replica shards for the customer. The bank was excited to have its timeout issue fixed, which its representatives initially faced. Plus, the internal user access was better regulated.
- Before the issue was resolved, every user would log in as an Elastic user and a privileged user with super access to make any changes within the cluster. It was streamlined by rotating and revoking the password of Elastic users in UAT and asking them to create new user profiles for the team. This ensured that no user ended up using Elastic anymore. With the new solution for user access and privileges, the bank now has better segregation of its user base while efficiently restricting access to unwanted account logins.
- The bank was able to improve its overall customer satisfaction levels with the help of Ashnik’s managed services without the need for design and deployment. By making the customer interaction history available to the agent, the speed of response towards the customer increased rapidly. Thus, the agents were able to increase the overall rate of their response time in responding to the customers in a quick and efficient manner.
Customer Delight
Ashnik provided the customer complete ownership by streamlining various activities under the project and giving them access to a centralized view of the various use cases of elastic. The customer was pleased with the new and improved solution that enabled high scalability, swift searches, and a quicker response rate – and it was delivered with a quick turnaround time.
The managed services provided by Ashnik increased the application’s performance to swiftly handle their key issues. As an extension, Ashnik will be handling the bank’s entire data migration and upgrade of its current IT infrastructure, by adding in more clusters and nodes to tackle scaling workloads.