People’s United Bank Sees 15x ROI With Virtusa’s Integration of Adobe Experience Manager and Yext Site Search

People's United Bank, a financial institution founded in 1842, has seen a significant downturn in foot traffic to its 402 branches as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and changes in consumer behavior. Customers have increasingly looked to conduct transactions online, which ultimately has led to a flood of customer support calls. In just three months from May to August 2020, the bank's inbound call volume increased by 161%.

"One lesson learned coming out of the peak pandemic — where there was a lot of pressure put on our call centers — was how essential it is to have an intuitive, informative web experience," James Roy, Head of Digital for People's United Bank, says. "We saw a lot of inbound inquiries from people who needed immediate answers. We had to ask ourselves: 'How do we rapidly enhance our user journeys to provide enjoyable and effective customer service at scale?'"

People's United tapped Virtusa, a leading global IT services company, to improve its online customer experience. "Virtusa accelerates business outcomes with innovative solutions complemented by strong engineering pedigree and a robust partner ecosystem," says Sanjay Deshpande, Virtusa's Executive Vice President and Head of Banking & Financial Services for the Americas. "We're essentially transformation agents for our clients."

Virtusa proposed a website redesign that leveraged both Adobe Experience Manager and Yext Site Search. "With Adobe and Yext, we've created a cutting-edge solution for financial brands," says Deshpande. "This two-pronged approach to digital transformation maximizes ROI, reduces support costs, and enhances the overall customer experience."

For People's United, it wasn't a hard decision. "This technology partnership with two proven platforms — Adobe and Yext — was a no-brainer," says Roy. "Virtusa has been with us every step of the way and the solution they suggested seemed like such a comprehensive plan for meeting our business objectives."

Launchpad, Virtusa's AI platform, allowed People's United to seamlessly integrate Adobe Experience Manager and Yext Site Search. The bank now provides its customers with a consistent, intuitive experience across its website, which alleviates the burden placed on call centers. Common search queries like "Where do I apply for a credit card?" and "How do I access my statements online?" receive direct answers, which allows customers to independently resolve issues without resorting to a time-consuming, frustrating support interaction.

Yext and Adobe worked together to launch Location, FAQ, and Product information on the bank's search experience. This streamlines the discovery and conversion process, and consumers can now ask natural language questions to receive directions to branches, ATMs, MLOs, and more.

As part of their digital transformation efforts, Virtusa also saw an opportunity to improve the bank's discoverability in third-party search results. People's United recognized the importance of maintaining consistent and accurate business information for its many brick-and-mortar locations but had previously not identified an ideal solution to manage this data at scale. Through Virtusa, the bank implemented Yext Location Listings to solve this problem and boost search engine optimization (SEO).

With Yext, People's United can now quickly and easily manage location listings across 200+ networks like Google, Amazon Alexa, and Facebook. "Yext has given us such efficiency," says Roy. "Our branch operations team can now input business hours and closures autonomously, without our oversight or input. That's beyond valuable to a small team like ours."

The bank's Experience Manager sites showed up in more than 239,000 unique Google searches this year — 87% of which were unbranded queries like "banks" and "atm near me." Google listings for branches and ATMs also received 44% more clicks year-over-year.

"Leveraging trusted partners is an essential part of any successful digital transformation," says Nik Shroff, Senior Director, Global Technology Partners at Adobe. "But it is especially important that those partners provide seamless integrations that can be flexibly deployed. That is exactly what People's United got with Virtusa, Adobe, and Yext. With this partnership, the bank was able to quickly see impressive ROI, improve their team's efficiency, and deliver an ideal experience to their customers."

The launch of Yext Site Search assisted in about a 50% and as much as 70% reduction in unnecessary support call volume in the months following the implementation compared to the months before. By integrating Yext Site Search and Adobe Experience Manager, People's United saw an estimated 15x annualized ROI on the platform for location entities alone — a number that rose to 35x annualized ROI when including locations, FAQs, and products.

"Before Yext, we had a very basic, out-of-the-box search experience. Now, our website has encountered a significant increase in search volume and instances of one-stop searches where people are actually finding what they're looking for on the first try," says Roy. "We've already seen some pretty impressive results from this technology partnership and expect to see even more moving forward."

*People's United Financial was acquired by M&T Bank on April 2, 2022