Thomaston Savings Bank: Increasing Account Openings, Automating After-Hours Support With Banking AI

Balancing Fast Self-Service With Personalized Care

Thomaston Savings Bank is committed to providing neighborly service to individuals and businesses throughout Connecticut. As a community-focused institution balancing digital ease with human touch, Thomaston Savings Bank aims to help customers efficiently self-serve while easily accessing support from local banking experts. 

With its CCaaS contract expiring, Thomaston Savings Bank recognized a need to better blend automation with personalized service. Delivering on both initiatives required a banking AI platform that would empower Thomaston Savings Bank’s team to improve speed, accuracy, and expertise while providing the fast self-service today’s consumers expect. 

Challenge: Legacy Systems, Overloaded Frontline Teams 

Prior to Glia, Thomaston Savings Bank faced operational friction caused by its legacy system. The bank’s chat platform operated as a basic FAQ database, unable to react to live interaction context or guide clients through complex banking processes. This resulted in a poor service experience that led clients to abandon their digital self-service efforts and pick up the phone when they needed help. 

Dependence on live phone support added pressure on frontline care teams. Consultants spent significant time answering routine inquiries, like verifying branch hours, confirming locations, reviewing product features, and helping clients navigate the online banking (OLB) platform. Because Thomaston Savings Bank operated within a lean staffing model, volume spikes during peak hours overloaded consultants and drove up wait times.

Consultants, meanwhile, faced challenges providing the expert, customer-focused service that Thomaston Savings Bank strived to deliver. While assisting clients over the phone, frontline consultants juggled up to four separate core programs, related applications, and complex procedure manuals. Jumping between systems prolonged handle times while distracting consultants from fully focusing on the client.

Outside normal business hours, Thomaston Savings Bank accumulated a backlog of voicemails and offline messages. Frontline teams began each morning sorting through queued requests, taking time away from real-time client support. 

Finally, legacy systems lacked automated quality management tools, forcing managers to spend hours conducting manual interaction reviews rather than providing actionable coaching to consultants.

Melissa Cipriano, Officer / Contact Center Manager, put Thomaston Savings Bank’s challenge simply. “Without an effective self-service solution and tools to help consultants work faster and smarter, we were missing out on an opportunity to meet modern consumer expectations while maintaining our high standards for community-focused service.”

Solution: Improving the Customer and Consultant Experience With Banking AI  

In Glia’s Banking AI Platform, Thomaston Savings Bank saw an innovative, banking-specific solution that would benefit both clients and consultants. Banking AI agents would help clients quickly self-serve, while internal AI copilots and tools would empower Thomaston Savings Bank’s staff to improve service, speed, and expertise.

Glia’s integration with Thomaston Savings Bank's COCC core enabled direct interactions within online banking, enabling clients to receive help without leaving their authenticated banking session. Glia also gave Thomaston Saving Bank confidence that its AI deployment would only bring safe, fully compliant answers to client interactions—an essential requirement for a community institution in the highly regulated banking industry.

“Glia gave us the confidence that they knew our industry, our challenges, and the importance of protecting relationships, compliance, and security—a sense of confidence we didn’t receive from other vendors,” said Cipriano.

Unifying voice and digital automation on Glia’s Banking AI Platform, Thomaston Savings Bank deployed a suite of solutions including:

• Glia Banker Digital replaced Thomaston Saving Bank's basic, FAQ-only chat with an AI agent built to handle banking tasks—like address updates and OLB navigation—instead of forcing clients to pick up the phone and ask a human consultant for help.
• Glia Banker Voice resolves inquiries around the clock with the industry’s fastest voice AI, decreasing reliance on human phone support while still offering callers a simple path to speak to a frontline consultant when needed.
• Glia Copilot provides consultants with approved institutional knowledge during interactions in real time, eliminating the need to juggle up to four core systems and internal manuals mid-call.
• Glia Analyst provides managers with automated transcript analyses and instant coaching insights previously unavailable to such a small team, closing Thomaston Saving Bank’s reporting and quality-management gap.
• Performance insights from Glia Analyst also give consultants direct access to their own post-engagement scores, supporting self-coaching without adding management overhead.
• CoBrowsing allows consultants to personalize digital support by taking over a client’s screen and collaboratively guiding them through complex banking processes, like completing a loan application.
• Live Transcription transcribes calls in real time, helping consultants improve service and record-keeping by focusing on the client conversation instead of jotting down notes.
• Phone Callback allows callers to receive help from the next available consultant without waiting in long queues, giving them time back in their day while reducing average wait time.

Results: 1,440+ Hours Saved, 76% Fewer Chat Requests, and Outperforming Benchmarks 

Within six months of launch, Thomaston Savings Bank's investment paid off on both fronts: clients received faster, more satisfying self-service and frontline consultants gained time and resources to improve care—all while Thomaston Savings Bank outperformed industry benchmarks for banking AI performance.

Glia Banker resolved routine requests across digital and voice channels, saving Thomaston Savings Bank more than 1,440 frontline hours since launch—more than 43 hours a week, the equivalent of adding 1.1 full-time employees (FTEs) without hiring. 

Automation also eliminated the servicing backlogs that used to eat into agents' mornings. Within just a few months, Glia Banker fully eliminated offline digital and voice messages—a 100% reduction. 

Glia Banker also handled 76% of chat requests that once went to live agents, freeing Thomaston Savings Bank’s consultants to spend more time on customers that really needed their help.

With automation deflecting routine inquiries for Thomaston Savings Bank’s consultants, Glia CoPilot helped them turn newfound capacity into better service. By surfacing approved institutional knowledge directly within interactions, CoPilot empowered consultants to improve care by quickly delivering accurate expertise without diverting attention from the customer. 

For managers and consultants, Glia Analyst automated transcript evaluation and uncovered coaching opportunities, saving an estimated 222 hours that would otherwise have gone into manual call review.

Six months into launch, Thomaston Savings Bank’s digital AI consistently outperformed industry averages and top benchmarks:

• Understanding rate reached 95%, outperforming the top benchmark
• Direct-to-Human rate fell to 0.6%, outperforming the top benchmark of 4.8%
• Containment rate reached 72%, less than 2 percentage points below the top benchmark

Thomaston Savings Bank’s voice AI performance was similarly impressive:

• Containment rate reached 63%, nearly 20 points above the industry average
• Understanding rate reached 86%, exceeding the industry average
• Direct-to-Human rate fell to 10%, outperforming the top benchmark 

Outcome: Improving Service, Increasing Account Openings

With Glia Banker deflecting routine requests and Glia Copilot putting approved institutional knowledge directly in consultants' hands, Thomaston Savings Bank converted efficiency gains into better service and new business.

Consultants now have more time to have in-depth banking conversations with customers—a shift that has contributed directly to an increase in online account openings, turning freed-up capacity into new business.

“With our consultants no longer consumed with questions about branch hours, locations, and basic OLB navigation, they can now shift to more meaningful conversations while also driving new business for our institution,” said Melissa Cipriano.

That same capacity has empowered Thomaston Savings Bank to improve service quality while keeping a lean staffing model. Even while its frontline team operates with open positions, Thomaston Savings Bank can now smoothly manage interaction volumes while maintaining a high level of client satisfaction—proof that pairing automation with internal AI tools empowers a community bank to scale service without scaling headcount.

Turn Efficiency Into Improved Service With Glia 

What can your financial institution achieve with the #1 Banking AI Platform? Talk to Glia today to eliminate operational friction, empower your frontline workforce, and drive measurable efficiency.

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