2025 Tekkie Award Co-Winner for Game Changer: Talkdesk

By Roy Urrico

Talkdesk, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered customer experience (CX) technology is a co-winner of the 2025 Game Changer Tekkie Award.

“I am delighted. Especially the work that (Finopotamus) does. It is a validation of the time, effort, and the partnerships that we have built with credit unions over the last several years. It is helping credit unions unlock significant value out of the investments that they are making with the technology that we are bringing to them,” Rahul Kumar, vice president and general manager at Talkdesk, told Finopotamus about winning a Tekkie award.

Transforming the CX Experience

With strong competition from online and other financial services companies as well as increasing member expectations, credit unions seek ways to deliver fast, personalized, and unified experiences that reduce costs and improve member loyalty. Talkdesk developed a solution to transform the credit union customer experience (CX) through a unified platform specifically built to support a holistic member journey.

The Talkdesk Financial Services CX Cloud Platform is a comprehensive solution tailored for credit unions and banks, Rahul Kumar, vice president and general manager at Talkdesk, told Finopotamus. Talkdesk uses generative AI, with its language model, and analytics, and agentic AI, which is capable of acting autonomously, to improve contact center interactions through AI-driven self- and assisted service. Talkdesk also uses, seamless omnichannel engagement, unified workforce optimization and actionable CX insights and analytics.

“Our platform helps credit unions in their fight to remain relevant. They are no longer competing with just the banks. They are competing with the fintechs. They are competing against non-traditional financial services providers that have come into the market,” said Kumar. He explained the Talkdesk platform helps credit unions completely revolutionize the member experience. “Not only does the platform personalize that experience, but it leverages some of its AI capabilities, helping them make personal experience the core part of their member expansion and retention strategies.”

Talkdesk capabilities, Kumar added, allows automated agents to not only understand and converse in real time (and in multiple languages and dialects), but also comprehend context, express empathy, analyze situations, make informed decisions, and take action to resolve requests.

Kumar asserted that Talkdesk helps credit unions by driving measured improvement such as satisfaction, net promoter (NPS) and employee satisfaction scores. “We basically help them influence or positively impact every customer experience and operational metric that are important to them.”

Platform Capabilities

Talkdesk builds its value proposition, explained Kumar, around the four themes:

• Fraud mitigation. “It is a big industry problem right now. Inbound fraud is rampant. We have brought in capabilities on our platform that allows them to identify and mitigate fraud.”

• Self-service automation. “Helping (credit unions and other financial institutions) achieve their growth and scalability ambitions while reducing the human capital cost.”

• Employee empowerment or agent empowerment. “Because employee attrition is a big challenge in banking and the credit union space. We offer tools like real-time guidance, giving them information they need on a single pane of glass through our core banking and CRM (customer relationship management) and digital banking integrations.”

• Operational excellence. The ability to identify trends, the mood or sentiment associated with conversations and interactions and automation opportunities through some of the AI and digital tools.

According to Kumar, key Talkdesk capabilities include:

• Omnichannel Communication: The platform ensures a consistent and personalized experience across all channels and integrates seamlessly into digital banking platforms such as Q2, NCR, and Alkami.

• Seamless Routing and Orchestration: Introduced in 2024, Talkdesk Navigator replaces interactive voice response (IVR) menus with AI-powered routing decisions. Talkdesk Workforce Management combines AI and automation with an intuitive user experience to accurately forecast and optimize contact center staffing and scheduling decisions.

• Autonomous CX: Launched in March 2024, Talkdesk Autopilot for Banking uses voice biometrics to securely authenticate customers and uses generative and agentic AI to provide customers with real-time, contextual responses to common banking queries. Its seamless integration with core banking platforms – such as Jack Henry, Fiserv and FIS – enables the automation of complex transactional processes.

• Hyper-Personalized CX: The platform consolidates customer information (account details, payments, etc.) and interactions (phone calls, text messages, email, etc.) into a single view for the agent.

• Proactive CX: Talkdesk Interaction Analytics uncovers correlations between diverse sets of customer interactions, surfacing trending topics and connections with customer behavior drivers, sentiment, and satisfaction. Mood Insights (June 2024) adds analysis of how emotions evolve throughout interactions, enabling scalable approaches to improve CX. Knowledge Creator (March 2025) proactively detects knowledge gaps in the Knowledge Base, suggests pre-written content, and pushes approved updates to Talkdesk Autopilot and Copilot. Talkdesk Quality Management automates interaction evaluations at scale, enabling proactive coaching that improves agent performance.

• Trusted CX: Responsible AI is a core pillar of Financial Services Experience Cloud; dashboards and tools help businesses protect their brand and maximize performance when adopting generative and agentic AI. In October 2024, new guardrails feature in Talkdesk AI Trainer enable observation and fine tuning of AI outputs in a no-code interface, to effectively monitor and manage AI behavior without technical hurdles.

• Unified, Open Platform: A flexible cloud platform with deep out-of-the-box integrations to core banking systems and open APIs for customization and future proofing.

“We have gradually evolved our platform in line to what credit unions expected from us. We have given them a seat at the table, so they have been very intimately involved in the way we have evolved our platform,” Kumar stated.

Measured Results

Credit unions with measurable results from Talkdesk products and services include:

• Fairfax, Va.-based Apple Federal Credit Union (AFCU, $5.24 billion, 268,300 members), improved its average speed of answer (ASA) to 5.17 minutes from 8.28 minutes after implementing Talkdesk Financial Services Experience Cloud. In addition, the credit union cut its call abandonment rate nearly in half, to 14.1% from 26.1%, while average hold times improved to 103 seconds from 146 seconds. AFCU’s overall member satisfaction score rose to 9.25 from 8.5 within a year.

• New York City based Municipal Credit Union (MCU, $4.5 billion, 618,000 members) used Talkdesk Ascend AI to automate 64% of routine tasks for inbound voice calls, significantly lowering overflow, and projects more than $1 million in savings.

• Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Collins Community Credit Union (CCCU; $1.6 billion; 82,000 members) has seen significant improvements since implementing Financial Services Experience Cloud in 2022. These include reducing inbound calls by more than 50,000 as members gain greater flexibility with self-service tools. Talkdesk Autopilot now handles over 10% of call volume, reducing call abandonment rates by more than 50%. Voice biometrics has also cut the time it takes for identity verification from 2.5 minutes to only seconds.

• Lombard, Ill.-based Credit Union 1 ($2 billion, 115,000 members) was able to enhance its self-service options with Talkdesk Autopilot, achieving a containment rate of about 70%, after going live with Financial Services Experience Cloud in late 2023. Additionally, Talkdesk Interaction Analytics and Talkdesk Quality Management enabled Credit Union 1 to transform its approach to member interactions, advancing from monitoring less than 2% of interactions to gaining actionable insights from 100% of them.