USSC’s growth in digital adoption — driven by mobile remittances and online financial services — placed pressure on customer support teams to triage a wider range of issues, from service questions to transactional enquiries. Before automation, manual workflows led to delays and inconsistent responses, especially as the customer base spanned linguistic diversity and periods of peak volume. The organisation needed:

• An engine that could handle remittance tracking, app troubleshooting, lost card reports and customer complaints automatically;
• Multilingual support that understood not just formal English but locally used Tagalog expressions and mixed language phrasing;
• A scalable model that reduced dependence on live agents while preserving accuracy and compliance.

The challenge was not merely one of efficiency but of customer experience: longer wait times eroded trust, and inconsistent service quality undermined confidence in digital financial services amid rising competition.

Proto’s approach began with a comprehensive assessment of USSC’s CX workflows and infrastructure, identifying high-value automation opportunities and refining intent definitions using historical support records. By training the virtual assistant — named UNA — on past transcripts, FAQs and typical service interactions, the system learned to interpret diverse customer phrasing and map them to structured outcomes. The deployment included:

• A multilingual natural language engine optimised for Tagalog and English, enabling accurate understanding across user inputs;
• Seamless handover to human agents when automation confidence was low, including pre-filled ticket generation to reduce agent effort;
• Integration with existing digital touchpoints such as webchat and Messenger, preserving the customer’s channel preferences;
• End-to-end security and privacy safeguards aligned with industry expectations for financial data handling.

This combination of automation and human-in-the-loop escalation ensured fast, consistent responses while supporting compliance and data security — essential in the financial services sector.

UNA now serves as the frontline support platform for USSC’s digital customer interactions, managing 60,000+ inquiries per year and achieving 85 % automation, with year-over-year increases in query handling. As a result:

• USSC handles 30 % more support requests without expanding its support team;
• Users receive quick, accurate responses in their preferred language;
• Agents are freed to focus on complex cases and higher-value tasks;
• Operational resilience improves, especially during demand spikes.

The agent capabilities span a wide range of financial service enquiries — including complaint filing (e.g. lost cards, fraud reports), remittance status, app troubleshooting, and secure ticket escalation — ensuring that users interact with a reliable and secure AI channel 24/7.

USSC’s experience with Proto also highlights a broader trend: AI solutions tailored to local languages and user behaviours can unlock significant gains not only in efficiency but in equity and access for diverse customer segments.