Advancing telephony for Ally: Our first step to next-gen telephony experiences

• Allison Velzke & Christopher Lynch-Barrow
• Dec 3, 2024
• 3 min read

In a time of relentless innovation, connected experiences, and demands of a rapidly evolving digital landscape, the modernization of telephony systems is an imperative. Modern telephony is more than just making or taking voice calls; it’s seamless communication, scalability, and resiliency to enable connections with our customers. Ally’s constant pursuit of advancement of our people, processes and technology served as the cornerstone of our cloud journey to create next-gen telephony experiences for our customers, and here’s how we did it. 

Monthly, Ally receives over 1 million callers and manages over 850 toll-free numbers. A migration to the cloud and of this magnitude is no easy feat, but Ally was up for the challenge and with key goals to avoid disruption for callers and to efficiently deliver new experiences that we hope callers find delightful. 

Migration with a strategic focus

In 2021, Ally embarked on modernizing its IVR (interactive voice response system) to a cloud-based telephony platform to support Ally’s next-gen telephony experience. Requiring migration of over 30 individual IVR experiences from Ally’s legacy platform, this migration was not a one size fits all approach. Each business unit within the organization had established different employee-user profiles, consisted of different operating sizes and experiences, as well as key performance measures. To remain strategic and experience-focused, our product team partnered closely with every business unit to suggest features from our new cloud-based platform to provide improved experiences with the goal of routing our customers quickly to the right place and meeting performance objectives. This approach was iterative and focused on continuous enhancements of each feature to use the platform’s full product suite.  

Upskilling our teams: Start small and grow 

We began with one line of business team, trained a small team of telephony engineers, product owners and testers on the cloud-based platform and set out to build the foundational platform. The team upskilled, sharing insights and learnings with each other, to build two broad, expert telephony teams with the first assignment to build a new telephony experience for an employee-pilot program of 200 participants before deciding to launch the first line of business experience to production. Although the migration is complete today, we continue to host joint portfolio sessions across all telephony teams here at Ally to continue to share learnings, best practices and to leverage the platform’s latest technology to continue to redefine experiences to be (even) better.  

Our approach in action 

Empowering our operations teams: Our operation teams require the flexibility to make real-time changes to the telephony experience to support our normal course of business. Examples include the ability to update call routing, business continuity and closure messaging in real time. Routing and closure flexibility enable the business to route callers to a specific set of agents based on the time of day, or to split routing of calls by a specified percentage to a group of agents that are available and can support a customer’s specific need. Additionally, providing operation teams with this self-service capability kept our development teams focused on creating new features rather than typical maintenance.  

Minimize disruption, learn and launch: To minimize customer impact during releases, a phased release approach to a subset of customers, rather than to the masses, helped us identify issues and address them quickly. As an example, in the first launch of natural language voice bots, we expanded the functionality to a small sub-set of our customer base. In doing so, we identified intents requiring additional tuning so that when we launched to the masses – we created exceptional experiences. These learnings allowed us to scale the migration in a manner that was digestible.

Leaning into the cloud

During and after our migration, it was imperative to solidify fundamental building blocks to advance our technology. Examples include:

• Intraday Observability and Workforce Management Resiliency: Enablement of real-time data lakes and alerting mechanisms to monitor system performance allowing us to be proactive and address issues before they reach our customers or agents.   

• Percentage-based routing:  Migrating internal associates and suppliers to one platform allows us, for each business line, to leverage percentage-based routing which aids intelligent call distribution to queues to route our customers to where they need to be quicker and smarter.   

• Tech stability and simplification: Our tech stability is rooted in a cloud-first mentality, with a simple middleware integration with our systems of record. This offers scalability at speed and integration-driven success.   

What’s Next?  

Ally completed migration of all legacy telephony platforms to our unified, cloud-based platform in March 2024. The migration was the just the first foundational step to create experiences that aim to make the most of our customer experiences by considering and anticipating our customers’ needs. We take immense pride in our recent migration, highlighting our constant pursuit of technology advancement and our commitment to serving agents and our customers. Here at Ally, understanding and prioritizing our customers’ needs is the name of the game!