When Chime rolled out its AI copilot Jade, the biggest challenge wasn’t the technology; it was trust.
“One of the things we really had to crack the nut on is we had to really get our customers to trust Chime,” Chime Chief Operating Office Janelle Sallenave said Wednesday. “Because if we're going to invite a member or invite a consumer to let us take actions about how to improve their financial cash flow, that's a pretty big trust fall to take. That's your money.”
The fintech is on a journey to help its customer base — generally, consumers making less than $100,000 — spend smarter, save more, pay their bills on time and borrow responsibly, Sallenave said during the CIO Dive and CX Dive joint event on AI in the enterprise.
AI can help Chime reach that goal, Sallenave said. Chime deployed Jade in customer service, where it assisted the majority of the company’s 50 million support interactions in 2024, to address time sensitive and important customer inquiries via chat and voice.
“We wanted to know how much and how hard would it be to automate without losing the type of quality that one of our human agents, human team members, is able to deliver?” Sallenave said. “And then second, we really wanted to figure out how that automation and human agents should work in sync to create the best customer experience possible.”
Chime dedicated itself to providing a high-quality and consistent experience, ensuring that every interaction it builds meets the standards that it sets around accuracy, clarity and reliability.
At the very beginning, customers would often interrupt Jade and request an agent. While the company wanted customers to try Jade, it wouldn’t block customers from talking to a human.
“One of our golden rules is we will never introduce friction,” Sallenave said. “If you want to talk to a human, we’ll give it.”
Eventually, Chime convinced consumers to try speaking with Jade and saw them become more comfortable with those interactions and more willing to speak to Jade again when it was able to resolve their issues.
Now, AI and automation handles 70% of all of Chime’s interactions. Resolution rates have increased by more than 40 percentage points.
Key to that success was building trust with customers by staying dedicated to the experience.
The focus was never on how to cut costs, Sallenave said. “It was really about: How does this technology enable us to deliver an experience that we feel like can be more and more differentiated? How can we improve the quality and the speed of support and then build on that to start getting into more, advice and sort of copilot type of work that's more proactive?”
From Day 1, the company agreed on its goals, so when IT, security and CX came together, they knew what they were working towards.
“What’s been really important is making sure from day one that we all understood what the hero metrics were and what we were trying to optimize for,” Sallenave said. “We have two: customer satisfaction and automated resolution rate. We expect both to improve.”
“We're not willing to make trade-offs against either one,” she said. “We're not willing to drive higher ROI through more automation. If we have to give up a little bit on the quality of the experience, that's sort of against the rule.”
Cost to serve has dropped — by as much as 60%, according to Chime. A recent survey of customers found that over 95% report that use of Chime’s products and services are helping them in their financial journey, and customer satisfaction related to support interactions increased by about 80% over the last three years, according to Sallenave.
“Automation and cost savings don’t need to come at the expense of a great experience,” Sallenave said.
Today, the company is working to make Jade not just reactive, but proactive. Instead of just responding to customer inquiries and providing educational static tools, the company is developing ways to use Jade to provide proactive financial management.
