AustraliaFinance and insurance2025 – ongoing

HBF

Agentforce assistant for contact-centre staff

HBF reported 8% shorter calls after expanding its AI assistant to 200 contact-centre staff

WorkingCompany's own claim

Problem

HBF wanted to reduce call-handling time and the time customers spent on hold while staff sought information.

Approach

HBF piloted a Salesforce Agentforce assistant with 30 staff in December 2025 and expanded it to all 200 contact-centre staff by late May 2026. It changed its language-model configuration after staff found responses too slow, accepting higher running costs. Newer recruits found the assistant more useful than experienced staff.

Results

8%decrease in average call duration over recent weeks, reported by HBFCompany's own claim[1]

30%reduction in hold time during customer interactions, reported by HBFCompany's own claim[1]

Takeaway

Response speed affected adoption enough for HBF to accept higher model costs.

Sources

HBF faces AI agent to members for first time
iTnews2 Jun 2026News article

Source summaries

[1]iTnews2 Jun 2026

HBF executives reported expanding the internal assistant from 30 pilot users to 200 contact-centre staff. They reported 8% shorter average calls and 30% less hold time, and described model changes following complaints about response speed.

Full details are in the original sources.

Added 1 Nov 2026 · Updated 1 Nov 2026