As questions around government economic relief flood financial institutions’ call centers, flustering customer service employees, some credit unions are stemming the tide with the help of AI-backed chatbots.

The move to implement customer-facing and internal chatbots has helped Midwest-based Advia Credit Union and East Coast-based Corning Credit Union to handle the load of customer service requests efficiently while saving costs.

For Advia, which has $2.1 billion in assets and serves 175,000 members, support calls and chats have skyrocketed during the pandemic, according to Joli Hensley, who oversees all aspects of the credit union’s digital and mobile banking. Online chat sessions online have spiked 44% and call volume has doubled, Hensley said, adding that questions in the past month have largely been about stimulus payments, COVID-19 relief and access to online banking.

“Really finding a solution — or having a solution that can really help all those basic questions — to allow our staff to serve more in-depth member needs has been key,” Hensley said.

Advia implemented AI-backed chatbot technology one year ago from LogMeIn, a software provider headquartered in Boston. The deflection rate, which has notched 82% for online chat, has “been a saving grace,” she said.

The bot has also helped Advia’s bottom line. The credit union used to funnel chat customer service and overflow call center volume to a third party, and implementing the chatbot has saved the lender $400,000. “Now you take something like COVID, which is doubling our call volume, and you can just imagine what that could have been as far as a further economic hurt for us to have all that overflow that we’re now able to keep in-house and deflect with the technology,” Hensley said.

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Meanwhile, Corning Credit Union, which operates in New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, expanded its use of the consumer-facing chatbot to help mitigate the confusion among frontline employees working remotely.

“The amount of content that we have to internally support employees is staggering,” said Chad Hessler, supervisor of digital services and support. “We’ve had challenges over the past few years knowing there’s this big compendium of knowledge that we’ve got, but getting somebody an answer really quickly in the moment … I can’t necessarily go look through an encyclopedia to find an answer to this question.”

Corning, which serves 112,000 members with $1.5 billion in assets, stood up an internal chatbot in five days to disseminate the most current information to call center employees. In the month after installing the internal bot, Corning’s call center had logged more than 2,000 interactions with the bot, with the technology answering about 80% of questions. Previously, the workforce relied on an internal chat room, which led to friction and mixed communication.

“Our goal is to provide quality, convenient — and most importantly in my world — knowledgeable service,” Hessler said. He added that it’s been helpful “to be able to disseminate knowledge across the organization in an instant — something changes and I can update that article and knowledge is instantly disseminated in an on-demand way — I don’t have to blast it out with an email reminder. When you need to know the answer it’s there.”