Senseforth.ai is enhancing customer support at scale by designing a contextual, intuitive and conversational virtual banking agent.

Overview

HDFC Bank is one of the top 10 largest banks in the world by market capitalization (April 2021). It is the largest private sector bank in India, with more than 68 million customers, and operates 6,342 branches. It is also one of the tech savviest banks with a digital reach to help its massive customer base.

Business Challenge

• With such a large customer base, it was difficult for the customer support team to deliver around-the-clock service.
• Additionally, the bank realized that high volume of similar support requests could be instantly resolved using AI, allowing agents to tackle more complex issues.
• There was an urgent need to implement a solution that allows for seamless and consistent customer engagement and support across multiple touchpoints.

HDFC Bank was considering Conversational AI as solution, which was intuitive and easy to use for their customers. They wanted the AI assistant to be able to provide context-sensitive and instant responses to customer queries, enabling their customer service agents to focus on more complex and higher-priority matters.

Senseforth.ai’s Approach

The Customer Experience team at HDFC Bank was seeking an effective solution to handle customer inquiries in real-time and decrease the volume of incoming phone calls.

During the first phase of implementation by Senseforth.ai, the AI Assistant was trained on a limited number of static queries. It was first launched on the website and mobile app.

Later, additional intents and entities were added, and end-to-end journeys were created to handle complex transactions. Moreover, the assistant was made accessible on various other channels such as Facebook Messenger, Google Assistant, Alexa, and even through a physical robot at the bank’s branch.

With the initial success, the scope was expanded to leverage the assistant as a lead generation channel. HDFC Bank also wanted the Intelligent Virtual Assistant, EVA, to be used as a lead generation channel. In addition to recommending suitable products, EVA handled product-related questions and addressed customer objections, encouraging prospects to share their contact details.

Over a period, the AI-powered virtual assistant was trained to handle over 8,000 intents across 200+ products and services and was made available on Google Business Messaging and WhatsApp. EVA was also integrated with various personalization engines and other backend systems to provide a seamless experience across all channels of communication.

Business Value

Senseforth.ai’s expertise in conversational AI helped HDFC Bank step into a new era of customer service. Eva is HDFC bank’s first-in-line customer service agent that helped break down the silo structure of customer support.

• Handles Customer Queries at Scale: EVA is trained to handle over 8000 intents and answer questions across various channels.
• 24/7 Support Across Touchpoints: Eva delivers instant customer support across multiple channels such as website, mobile banking app, Alexa, Google Assistant, and WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and others making it easy for customer to get assistance on all touchpoints.
• Multi-lingual Support: HDFC’s EVA is built to interact with consumers in a natural processing language, i.e., it understands the everyday vocabulary of the customers supporting English as well as Hindi.
• Quick Actions with secured authentication: One of the key features of HDFC Bank’s EVA is its ability to handle transactional queries using customer authentication through a one-time passcode. For example, tasks such as accessing account information and blocking a card can all be done through the virtual assistant, EVA.
• Seamless Integration: The virtual banking assistant has been integrated with multiple CRMs and databases, which enables more complex user journeys.

Business Impact

EVA is considered one of the most efficient and sophisticated conversational AI solutions in the world. It enables the HDFC bank to cut support costs, improve the quality of service (QoS) & also contributes to the top-line.

Post-implementing EVA, HDFC bank witnessed the following business impact-

• Generates over 50,000 qualified leads each month, resulting in growth in top-line.
• EVA handles more than 16 million questions every month, demonstrating a high volume of customer usage. This indicates that customers are effortlessly resolving their queries, which leads to a reduction in overall customer support costs.
• With an accuracy rate of over 95.5%, this results in maximizing overall customer satisfaction.
• HDFC’s Eva handles the workload of more than 800 human agents, resulting in cost savings from reduced training and overhead expenses.