For customer experience leaders, adopting AI can feel like navigating a minefield of vendors, metrics and compliance risks. Success depends on operational discipline, governance, vendor alignment and careful integration into existing workflows.
US-based Chime, an app-first financial services company, has found that treating AI customer service agents like full-fledged team members can boost resolution rates and give buyers a clear roadmap for working with vendors to scale technology effectively.
As Janelle Sallenave, Chief Experience Officer at Chime, told CX Today in an interview:
"We made sure to design the ecosystem so that we could treat these bots the same way we treat agents.”
The fintech’s AI chatbot and voice bot now handle around 70 percent of its customer support. The quality of that experience, measured by CSAT, has increased by more than 50 percent in some channels. “That makes sense if you're comparing a really good GenAI bot versus… the endless tree of the IVR. Of course, the support feels better. But for us, what is also really important is that the resolution rate is up almost 40 percent," Sallenave said.
What does it mean in practice to treat these AI bots like human support teams?
Holding AI to the Same Standard as Human Agents
Chime applies the same quality assurance (QA) and governance frameworks to its AI chatbots that it uses for human agents, Sallenave explained.
“We don't view talking to the chatbot—her name is Jade—any differently than talking to an agent named Sally. Those both produce transcripts from that live interaction, and we put them through the QA."
“The data source that they come to is no different than an agent. The SOP and the underlying policy are all exactly the same. So the bot is as empowered as a human agent.”
This ensures that Chime’s AI-based interactions maintain quality, brand voice and compliance. By treating AI as a full-fledged agent, the fintech is creating measurable and auditable interactions, transforming AI from a black box into a partner in the support operation.
“It was a great way to jumpstart the program because we have spent so many years finding the right QA environment for a human agent.”
That approach is helping Chime “not just identify the areas where a live agent might need to be coached; it is giving our team data about where we might need to make adjustments in the model,” Sallenave said. There is value in “being able to get that insight and bring it back to our GenAI partners and say, we've looked at it and in this area the bot isn't doing what we really intended.”
Aligning Vendors to Your North Star Metrics
One of the biggest challenges tech buyers face is ensuring that vendors are aligned with an organization’s goals. While vendors focus on metrics like containment or cost reduction, Chime prioritizes quality of resolution and customer satisfaction, Sallenave noted.
“We don't view our work in AI as being about cost savings, ‘hey, let's replace people.’ It's really for us more about ‘how do we remove friction in the economy.’"
To that end, Chime established two “hero metrics,” automated resolution rate and CSAT. As Sallenave explained, “It’s not that hard to make one rise at the expense of the other. Our real challenge to them was we need both.”
Chime uses two different vendors for its chatbot and voice bot for “optionality”. The fintech views those relationships as strategic partnerships, rather than a straightforward customer-vendor dynamic, Sallenave said.
“We’ve invested the time and energy with both of those companies so that our goals are their goals and vice versa. They care as much about the CSAT as we do, not just about containment rate.”
That has taken some adjustments along the way for the vendors to internalize Chime’s priorities and rethink their usual instincts around optimization. "We've had a trip up here or there where we do our analysis and we're saying, ‘why did that automated resolution rate up jump so quickly?’ And we’d discover some engineer somewhere, deep in the company that we work with, added a little bit of friction to get to a live agent,” Sallenave said.