How Schwäbisch Hall makes Customer Service more personal with Voice AI and relieves the Dialog Center

• 500,000 calls handled by the AI Agent in 6 months

• Increase in authentication rate to over 80%

• 98% success rate in intent recognition

With around seven million contracts, Schwäbisch Hall is the largest building community in Germany. It is one of the leading providers in construction financing. Around 6,700 employees and sales partners in internal and field sales work closely with cooperative banks to ensure that customers receive qualified advice and support.

As part of its digital transformation, Schwäbisch Hall relies on AI Agents from Parloa – demonstrating how tradition and innovation can successfully work together in customer communication.

The challenge

Bausparkasse Schwäbisch Hall AG receives around one million calls per year, distributed across various service numbers for customers and sales partners. The high volume and wide variety of inquiries could no longer be handled efficiently with the existing voice dialogue system and its rigid menu structure. Especially at a time when fast, convenient help around the clock is expected, Schwäbisch Hall wanted to better support customers and relieve the dialog center.

To achieve this, the building society sought a secure AI solution that automates common service processes – no easy task in the highly regulated financial environment. The choice fell on Parloa because its solution was the only one to convincingly meet all professional, technical, and regulatory requirements.

The solution

Schwäbisch Hall expands its dialogue center with a Voice AI Agent from Parloa. The agent handles all incoming calls – around 500,000 in the first six months. Callers freely describe their concerns, for example, regarding building savings information, questions about annual account statements, or housing construction premiums.

The agent understands natural language as well as technical terminology and recognizes customer needs with 98% accuracy directly in the conversation. It authenticates callers, increasing the authentication rate to over 80%. The AI Agent resolves many tasks independently, while routing others to the appropriate department. In this way, the AI Agent guides customers quickly and securely to the right solution without button presses or waiting times. At the same time, it frees up employees’ capacity for personal consultation.

16 use cases with voice AI in operation

The Voice AI Agent operates in a people-centric and legally compliant manner. It supports employees as a permanent team member and covers 16 use cases, including:

• Intent Recognition: The AI Agent reliably identifies different customer concerns.

• Intelligent Routing: It precisely routes callers to the responsible contact person and transfers all relevant information – the conversation continues seamlessly.

• Secure Authentication: Authentication takes place dialog-based within the conversation with the AI Agent, including security questions – secure and without keypad input.

• Autonomous Services: The AI Agent handles the adjustment and maintenance of master data, such as addresses or phone numbers, end-to-end without handing them over to the service team.

• FAQs: It answers frequently asked questions about building savings and contract topics directly and without waiting times.

Why Parloa?

Schwäbisch Hall shortlisted three AI solutions after evaluating what’s in the market. Parloa stood out due to the combination of innovative Voice AI technology, customer centricity, as well as security and compliance:

• Voice focus of the AI platform

• Easy integration into existing systems and scalability

• Low-code approach for rapid further development of use cases

• Fulfillment of regulatory requirements from BaFin & ECB and data protection regulations under GDPR, DORA, and the EU AI Act

• Integrated security mechanisms

• High professional expertise and pragmatic approach of the Parloa team

Future-oriented collaboration

Schwäbisch Hall and Parloa were the perfect match from the very beginning:

The project is implemented by an interdisciplinary team consisting of the Dialog Center, IT operations, the Digital Transformation Building Savings department, as well as Parloa and the implementation partner KINOVA. It started with a pilot, followed by the first use cases. Later, additional applications, FAQs, and autonomous services were added. The AI solution is continuously developed iteratively.

The results

The AI Agent has relieved the team since day one of deployment and delivers measurable results:

• 500,000 calls handled by the AI Agent in 6 months

• Increase in authentication rate to over 80%

• 98% success rate in intent recognition

• Precise routing to experts with transfer of all relevant information

• No waiting times for FAQs and fully automated end-to-end processes such as address changes

What’s next

As part of its innovation strategy, Schwäbisch Hall continuously develops the AI Agent and gradually scales it across the company. In the future, it will be used not only on the phone but also in chat. At the same time, it will take on more responsibility along the entire customer journey. This will enable the AI Agent to address customer concerns even more specifically and increasingly resolve cases end-to-end.

Together with Parloa, Schwäbisch Hall consistently drives innovation through AI – setting new standards in customer communication for financial providers. The goal is to sustainably establish the use of secure and responsible AI throughout the entire industry.