BCU delivers human-centered service on demand with Agentforce.

As BCU grew nationally, they needed digital service that matched the strength of their people-first mission.

BCU began in 1981 as the employee credit union for Baxter International, built on the belief that Financial Services should improve people’s lives. Over four decades, they’ve grown into a national, member-owned credit union with more than 360,000 members and over $6 billion in assets, expanding through partnerships with major employers like Target and GEICO. Their growth strategy has always centered on relationships, trust, and helping members build financial well-being.

As their membership expanded across time zones, industries, and financial needs, BCU saw a new opportunity: Extend their human-centered service into digital channels. Members increasingly expected immediate, personalized answers — whether applying for a loan after work hours, exploring new financial products, or asking simple everyday questions.

BCU wanted these experiences to match the speed, clarity, and warmth that define their human service. But behind the scenes, delivering that consistency required service teams to move between 12–15 different systems just to support a single interaction. “It was like watching a duck glide across a pond — calm on the surface but paddling frantically underneath,” said John Sahagian, Chief Data Officer. They knew that unifying systems would help teams respond faster and more consistently.

Their previous chatbot also couldn’t support their ambitions. It relied on static NLP flows, returned long articles instead of direct answers, and couldn’t take action — like generating product interest, opening a service case, or scheduling an appointment. As a result, 26% of chats escalated to a human, even for simple questions that should have been resolved digitally. That meant missed opportunities to guide members quickly and confidently through financial decisions.

BCU’s vision was clear: Deliver modern, intuitive digital service that feels as helpful as talking to a live representative — available anytime, across channels, and consistent with their mission of improving financial wellbeing.

To achieve that, they needed AI capable of understanding natural language, interpreting intent, and completing tasks with the right context on behalf of members. And most importantly, they needed a solution that could scale with their growing national footprint.

Agentforce Financial Services gives BCU a deeply unified platform to power real-time, personalized member support.

BCU brought their member data, financial profiles, knowledge articles, and service workflows into Agentforce Financial Services, creating a single, trusted platform for both AI agents and frontline teams to drive member success together. For example, when a member asks about loan options, Agentforce retrieves their relationship details, existing accounts, and financial profile from Agentforce Financial Services, then combines it with curated knowledge to explain the exact steps and options relevant to them.

Because Salesforce already served as BCU’s system of record — housing member profiles, product data, case history, and curated knowledge — the shift to deploying AI agents with Agentforce required no data migrations or new infrastructure. The logic, rules, and processes they depend on already lived in the platform. 

Agentforce offers personalized guidance and support as “Freeda,” the financial freedom assistant.

On top of their unified platform in Agentforce Financial Services, BCU launched Freeda — their Agentforce-powered “financial freedom assistant” — to bring personalized guidance to every member conversation. Unlike their legacy bot that could only provide article links, Agentforce understands natural language and even acknowledges nuanced comments like,  “This might be a silly question,” or “Thanks, Freeda, you’re the best.” During a recent member interaction, a customer prefaced a question by saying, “This might be a paranoid question …,” a phrase that would have completely stalled their legacy bot. As John Sahagian explains, “Legacy bots stop the conversation. Agentforce rolls with it. Freeda understands what the member means and keeps the conversation moving.”

More importantly, Freeda takes action; she doesn’t just answer questions.

Because she’s built on the deeply unified Headless 360 platform, Freeda doesn’t just talk — she acts on trusted data. When a member asks about a process, Freeda draws directly from curated Salesforce Knowledge articles to explain financial steps in plain language. Before Agentforce, BCU’s chatbot relied on nearly 1,000 hand-built intents, each requiring rigid scripts and constant upkeep. When they launched Freeda, they needed just 50 defined intents. “As we expand her, we simply feed her curated knowledge instead of building hundreds of dialogues,” Sahagian said. “It’s night and day.”

This shift is possible because Freeda acts on trusted data already centralized in Salesforce. “Giving Freeda access to that information gives us confidence in how she responds,” Sahagian said.  If the member needs help, she can open a service case using information already stored in Agentforce Financial Services, so employees see the full context the moment they pick it up. When a member expresses interest in a product, Freeda uses product and relationship data in Agentforce Financial Services to capture that interest and route it as a lead for follow-up. And when a journey is more complex — like navigating titling, loan options, or multistep requests — she combines knowledge content with BCU’s business rules and workflows to guide members through each step, start to finish, in a single conversation.

This shift — from static answers to contextual, data-driven, actionable support — is reshaping BCU’s digital experience. Now, most questions resolve entirely within chat, contributing to BCU’s 82% resolution rate and dramatically reducing the need for manual escalations. Human agents spend less time answering repetitive questions and more time delivering the kind of deep financial guidance BCU is known for. BCU took a thoughtful approach to introducing Agentforce. They began by routing just 5% of member conversations to Freeda and monitored escalation rates, conversation quality, and member sentiment in Salesforce dashboards. The improvements were immediate — higher containment, more natural conversations, and clearer pathways for members. “We realized almost right away that we were underutilizing her,” Sahagian said. BCU quickly scaled to routing more than 50% of chats to Freeda, where she continues to deliver consistent results.

“Members don’t want to read a bunch of articles,” Sahagian said. “They want contextual answers, which is exactly what Freeda provides.”

Agentforce improves experiences for both members and employees with generated summaries that expedite service.

When a question requires human expertise, Agentforce provides depth and clarity. Conversational catch-up summarizes the context of each conversation so employees instantly understand the member’s intent and what Freeda has already handled. This eliminates manual transcript-reading and contributes to the 27% faster handle time BCU now sees in escalated cases.

For example, a member asking about auto titling and registration once received links or unclear instructions. Now, Freeda walks them through the process conversationally — offering clarity, confidence, and next steps in under two minutes.

BCU is scaling Agentforce across the member lifecycle — from service to lending.

After success in digital service, BCU is expanding Agentforce into lending operations to help loan officers, who manage 50-70 active opportunities at any given time. Many early-stage leads showed genuine interest but often went untouched simply because there weren’t enough hours in the day. To close that gap, BCU built a lead-nurture agent designed to engage auto-loan prospects after hours, answer their questions, and warm them up for a meaningful human conversation.

Powered by Agentforce Financial Services, the nurture agent accesses the borrower’s web engagement history, lead status, and prior conversations, allowing it to tailor its outreach and recognize indicators of high intent. When a member responds, the agent updates the lead in Service Cloud and schedules time directly on the loan officer’s calendar — complete with context the officer can act on immediately. Members receive timely, relevant support, and loan teams regain hours previously spent on repetitive outreach. It’s a shift that elevates both productivity and member experience.

As Tyler Dowd, Senior Director of the Salesforce Program at BCU, explained, “We’re already seeing the difference. Agentforce isn’t theoretical — it’s doing real work. Our agents are spending less time on cold outreach and more time having meaningful conversations with qualified borrowers, which is exactly where we want them focused.”

Building on this momentum, BCU plans to deploy three new Agentforce agents every quarter, creating a digital workforce that complements their human teams and supports members across every stage of their financial journey. As John Sahagian put it, “This is the first time we feel like scalability is truly possible for a midsize financial institution.”

BCU chose Salesforce because it offered something no other vendor could: a deeply unified, secure Financial Services platform where connected apps, data, AI agents, and people work together seamlessly. “We already had so much member data, business logic, and curated knowledge inside Salesforce,” Sahagian said. “It made the most sense to build on what was already working.”

For BCU, Agentforce is not just an AI agent — it’s the next phase of a long-term transformation made possible by years of building on Salesforce. Because their knowledge base, member data, and workflows were already centralized in Agentforce Financial Services, Agentforce delivered accurate guidance and actions on Day 1.

Salesforce also provides the security and governance required by a member-owned, regulated financial institution. With features like the Agentforce Trust Layer, audit logs, data masking, and platform encryption, BCU can confidently scale agentic AI while upholding their commitment to privacy and transparency.

What’s more, Salesforce enables BCU to innovate without friction. With low-code tools, they can build new agents, refine workflows, and extend agentic AI across service, sales, and lending — without heavy engineering or complex development cycles. “Freeda launched with just 50 defined intents,” Sahagian explained. “We’re now able to empower her simply by feeding curated knowledge rather than writing rigid dialogues.”

Finally, Salesforce gives BCU the foundation for a sustainable digital labor strategy. With plans to deploy multiple agents each quarter — from after-hours loan nurture agents to financial-wellbeing assistants — BCU is building a smarter, faster, more proactive digital workforce made possible because Agentforce sits atop a single system of record.

For BCU, Salesforce isn’t just powering AI — it’s powering a new model of service, where digital and human employees work side by side to deliver personalized guidance, operational efficiency, and deeper financial confidence for every member.