AI Virtual Banking Assistant
Overview
Managed CIBC's Virtual Assistant, a conversational AI agent serving the bank's retail customers. Launched during the pandemic period of reduced branch availability, this product alleviated contact center capacity constraints by enabling customers to self-serve both informational needs and core banking transactions at scale.
Key Impacts
- $1M+ in annual savings from deflected contact center calls.
- 25% reduction in live agent escalations through improved capabilities.
- 43% increase in engagement through contextual messaging.
- Led 20-person cross-functional team with partners from engineering, design, data science, QA, and customer support.
Launches
Contextual Messaging
Challenge
Customers were frequently opening and closing the Virtual Assistant chat window without sending a message. At this time, sentiment towards chatbots wasn't positive, so we needed to highlight relevant capabilities immediately.
Solution
Implemented contextual messaging which highlighted Virtual Assistant capabilities relevant to the current banking page of the user. In the month after launch, this increased engagement by 43%.
Expanding Capabilities
Challenge
40% of Virtual Assistant conversations were being escalated to live human agents.
Solution
Analyzed escalated conversations and dervied common themes. Added 100+ new conversational intents (capabilities) to the Virtual Assistant, decreasing the escalation rate to 30%.
Mobile Expansion
Challenge
Initial Virtual Assistant launch was done only on the web banking platform. A large portion of customers primiarily used the mobile app where live agent chats were the sole support option and often had long wait times.
Solution
Led engineering, design, data science, support, and QA teams in creation and launch of the mobile Virtual Assistant experience. This enabled consistent customer support experiences across all platforms and decreased the burden on contact centers.
