Emirates NBD leverages on virtual assistant for phone banking optimisation

Emirates NBD Virtual Assistant (Eva) is the first-in-region natural voice recognition technology based automated phone banking assistant and also first-in-the world for Arabic language. Eva freed customers from the complex and frustrating maze of the touch-tone IVR; saving them considerable time and effort to get a solution for their issues.

IVR is increasingly reaching its optimisation levels in regards to digitisation and scalability, however the technology has never been well accepted among banks. It has huge limitations in the number of automations it can offer and the number of services that can be added to it. At the same time, it faces challenges with high call handling time, high abandoned calls and low customer experience, hence driving up operational cost and leading to brand and value erosion.

The bank’s key operational reason to choose phone banking optimisation as a starting point was to arrest increasing calls to agent due to a reduced digital containment rate, an indicator that measures the degree of end to end digital self-servicing.

Solution

EVA was designed in the lines of personal assistant like Apple's Siri, Google Now and FaceBook's M, however it has been enabled with full back end integrations for end to end banking fulfilment capabilities.

Eva is trained to deal with 150 skills which are the most common reasons why a customer calls in and this can be scaled further as needed. Conceptualised in 2015, Eva was launched in February 2017 and implemented across all major retail financial services helplines by June 2017. The assistant currently handles around 500,000 customer calls per month with a Recognition accuracy of around 90% for English and 86% for Arabic.

Business impact

Based on technology provided by Nuance, with EVA, IVR is not eliminated as it continues to run in the background, but the customer navigates through the channel by using simple voice commands without the need to press buttons and hear long winding menu mazes, a practice still common across domestic banks in the Asia Pacific and the Middle East. With EVA, the IVR tree does not exist in the customer interface anymore.

In addition, there is a seamless machine to agent handshake as the calls are routed, hence the agent is aware of the intent of the call before he addresses the customers. Eva increased automation and improved end to end fulfilment on phone-banking from 11% to 19% while reducing the calls to agents by 14%. While steering the calls, Eva reduced incorrect routing by 73% and has also resulted in overall 50% reduction in the time taken to digitally serve a customer as compared to IVR. 

Before launching EVA, the bank had about 20 automation services.  The current  platform has 47 fully automated services.  The most significant improvements were witnessed by the reduction in the number of abandoned calls by 11%. Positioning for the right agent to the customers is a key challenge for any bank but with EVA, the bank could reduce wrong agent skill routing and thus recalling of the customer by 73%.

The assistant also generates digital leads for cards, loans and account products; and the bank is in the process to add the capability of fulfilling the immediate conversion of a 0% instalment plan for credit cards in near future.

Source: Emirates NBD