Redesigns member service around how members want to bank.

Empowering employees to focus on complex needs.

Washington State Employees Credit Union (WSECU) has spent nearly 70 years putting members first. Founded in 1957 and headquartered in Olympia, Washington, the not-for-profit financial cooperative serves more than 325,000 members across more than 25 branches and manages more than $5 billion in assets.

For WSECU, putting members first means giving them the freedom to choose how they bank. Some members want the speed of self-service. Others want the expertise of an employee. WSECU is building a hybrid workforce that brings together human expertise and AI-powered digital workers to deliver both.

Using Talkdesk Financial Services Experience Cloud for Banking and Talkdesk Customer Experience Automation, WSECU is connecting authentication, intent recognition, AI-powered self-service, and human support.

Improving member service through technology.

As WSECU grew, its legacy contact center technology made it increasingly difficult to deliver the seamless experience it envisioned. Its aging, on-premises phone system required separate platforms for call recording, telephone banking, and quality management. Even simple changes could require manual IT work, while remote employees experienced connectivity issues. As Natasha Damian, Contact Center Director puts it, “The technology wasn’t working for us. We were working for the technology.”

WSECU set out to replace fragmented technology with a connected foundation for member service.

Turning authentication into secure self-service.

More than 100,000 WSECU members were already enrolled in voice authentication. The credit union wanted to preserve that trusted experience without requiring members to re-enroll.

The migration carried those enrollments forward while bringing previously separate capabilities onto one platform. Call recording, telephone banking, and quality management are now unified, while real-time dashboards give leaders greater visibility into contact center performance.

With its legacy telephone banking system reaching end of life, WSECU rebuilt the experience using Talkdesk Autopilot and connected it to its Jack Henry core banking system through PortX.

When members call, they are authenticated and Talkdesk Navigator identifies their intent. Voice-verified members can then choose Ava, WSECU’s agentic AI agent, for routine requests such as checking balances, reviewing transactions, and transferring funds.

Today, Ava contains an average of 80% of calls routed to her, either resolving the interaction or appropriately escalating the member to an employee.

The economics are compelling: a call contained by Ava costs approximately $1, compared with $12 or more when handled by an agent.

Building a hybrid workforce.

WSECU isn’t using AI simply to automate interactions. It’s using AI to make employees more available for the moments when human expertise matters most.

Talkdesk Copilot gives agents relevant knowledge and conversation context in real time, while Ava handles routine interactions that members want completed quickly.

Members can choose self-service when they want speed and convenience, or connect with an employee when they need expertise or help with a complex issue. As Damian explains, “There’s a feeling that AI is going to take everybody’s jobs. That’s not what we’re about at WSECU. We want our agents available to help members with fraud, account takeover, and digital banking troubleshooting.”

Start small, prove value, expand.

WSECU is taking a measured approach to agentic AI, focusing first on high-volume, lower-complexity use cases. As Jack Funk, Infrastructure Director and Enterprise Architect at WSECU, explains, “We focus on specific, high-volume opportunities and don’t try to solve everything at once. If we can get 20, 30, or 40% containment on a use case, we consider that a victory.” For WSECU, 20–40% containment is a successful target for an individual AI use case before expanding to the next opportunity. This approach allows the credit union to prove value, learn from each use case, and expand automation responsibly.

AI that supports the human experience.

WSECU sees AI as a way to give members more choice while freeing employees to focus on interactions where empathy and expertise matter most.

AI governance committees and ongoing interaction reviews help ensure Ava meets WSECU’s standards for security, privacy, and service. AI interactions are currently opt-in, reinforcing the credit union’s commitment to transparency and member choice.

Ultimately, WSECU’s transformation isn’t about replacing the human touch. It’s about making routine banking faster and easier while ensuring that when members need a knowledgeable employee, one is there to help.