Head of the Multimedia Customer Relations Center at Banque de Polynésie, a subsidiary of the Société Générale Group in French Polynesia, Nina Morgenstern manages new projects and the interweaving of different remote banking channels.
What is your company and what is your role in it?
Banque de Polynésie is a subsidiary of the Société Générale Group in French Polynesia. It has 15 branches in Tahiti and the islands.
The Customer Relations Center (CRC) provides first-level contact with our customers and prospects, as well as support for customer advisors in answering unanswered calls in branches. The CRC team is also experienced in the use of remote banking tools: website, online banking, switchboard, voice server, and now chatbot!
What issues did you face before launching your chatbot?
We were facing a high volume of calls on recurring questions: what are the opening hours of my branch? how long does it take for funds to be available when a cheque is deposited? what is the fee for a particular transaction? how can I stop payment on my card?…
And yet, the answer exists elsewhere, in our branches, on our website, on our online banking tools, on our voice server, on our account statements… all of which the bank makes available to its customers. It’s a simple fact: our customers, like the rest of us, are human, and human beings often prefer to ask questions rather than seek answers. Added to this is the strong oral culture in Polynesia. The launch of Atea, the Banque de Polynésie’s chatbot, was therefore an obvious choice, as it solves a number of problems:
- users ask questions instead of looking for answers
- it asks these questions in natural language, without needing to know any banking jargon.
- the chatbot holds a real conversation, its answers are meant to be complete and reflect the reality of the questions asked previously over the phone. It even bounces back commercially whenever possible!
Why choose Botnation?
The Botnation chatbot creation platform was identified by the Société Générale Group as the most suitable for the subsidiaries’ needs, in particular with the possibility of setting up a website chatbot and a Facebook Messenger chatbot.
What was the creative process like?
After all the steps involved in launching a project, setting up the script and writing the content was the most time-consuming task at the outset. The project was therefore set up within the Customer Relations Center, a hotbed of recurring questions and always up to date with what’s going on with our customers and the Bank, with subsequent contributions from all the Bank’s business lines to validate the content of the answers to be given to customers.
Content enrichment is a much lighter, more absorbable daily task. On a day-to-day basis, it’s also up to the CRC to take over when the bot can no longer answer: the user can entrust his question to a human thanks to the click-to-call function (transfer to a human advisor via a telephone call).
Have you seen any initial results?
Initial results have been very positive, with over 4,000 conversations in the month of launch, rising to 2,000/month thereafter. And above all, a user satisfaction rate of around 70%!
At CRC, new recurring questions regularly arise, which are then used to feed the chatbot’s answers. Offloading more and more recurring questions from CRC to make our customers autonomous is a major challenge, but it’s the only way the team will be able to free up high value-added sales time.
Would you have any advice for a company that also wants to launch a chatbot?
Ownership and promotion of this new tool throughout the company is essential to its success. In a company like ours, spread over several sites, we have chosen to appoint ambassadors to ensure the flow of information upstream and downstream, to encourage their colleagues to use the tool, and to report any malfunctions or improvements.
An unforeseen use of the chatbot made it easy for us to promote it: Atea, the Banque de Polynésie chatbot, now knows over 500 answers to common questions about the bank. It has thus become an essential ally for our advisors, who now also use it as a document base!
You can find Atea on the Banque dePolynésie website.
