Bank of Polynesia: feedback on its chatbot Atea.

The chatbot of the bank of Polynesia

Nina Morgenstern is in charge of the Multimedia Customer Relations Center at the Bank of Polynesia, a subsidiary of the Société Générale Group in French Polynesia. She is in charge of new projects and the interweaving of the various remote banking channels.

What is your company and what is your role in it?

The Bank of Polynesia 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 to answer unanswered calls in the branches. The CRC team is also experienced in the use of remote banking tools: website, online banking, switchboard, voice server, and now chatbot!

What were your issues before launching your chatbot?

We were experiencing a high volume of calls with recurring questions: What are the opening hours of my agency? How long does it take for funds to be available when depositing a check? what is the cost of such an operation? how to stop my card ?…

However, the answer exists elsewhere, in the branch, on our website, on the online banking tools, on the voice server, on the account statements… so many media that the bank makes available to its customers. It’s a simple fact: our customers are like all of us, human, and humans often prefer to ask the question rather than seek the answer. In addition, there is a strong oral culture in Polynesia. The launch of Atea, the chatbot of the Bank of Polynesia, appeared obvious since it allows to solve several points:

  • the user asks questions instead of looking for the answer
  • it asks them in natural language without needing to know the established banking jargon
  • the chatbot holds a real conversation, its answers are meant to be complete and reflect the reality of the questions asked previously by phone. It even bounces back commercially when possible!

Why did you choose the Botnation solution?

The Botnation chatbot creation platform was identified by the Société Générale Group as being the most suitable for the needs of its subsidiaries, particularly with the possibility of setting up a chatbot for a website and a Facebook Messenger chatbot.


What was the creative process?

After the steps that are typical of any project launch, the most time-consuming mission at the beginning was the scripting and writing of the content. It was therefore within the Customer Relations Center, a hotbed of recurring questions and always up to date with our customers’ and the Bank’s news, that this project was set up, with the subsequent contribution of all the Bank’s business lines to validate the content of the answers to be provided to customers.

Content enrichment is a much lighter and more absorbable daily job. On a day-to-day basis, it is also the CRC’s responsibility to take over when the bot can no longer answer: the user has the possibility of entrusting his or her question to a human thanks to the click-to-call function (transfer to a human advisor via a telephone call).


Have you been able to measure the first results?

The first results of use are very positive with more than 4,000 conversations in the month of launch and 2,000/month thereafter. And above all, a user satisfaction rate of around 70%!

At CRC, new recurring questions arise regularly, which are then used to feed the chatbot’s answers. A major challenge is to take the burden of recurring issues off CRC’s shoulders and make our clients self-sufficient, so that the team can free up valuable sales time.


Would you have some advice for a company that also wants to launch a chatbot?

The appropriation and promotion of this new tool by the whole company is an essential element for its success. In a company like ours, spread over several sites, we have chosen to appoint ambassadors who ensure the fluidity of information upstream and downstream, to encourage their colleagues to use the system and to report malfunctions or improvements.

An unanticipated use of the chatbot allowed us to promote it easily: Atea, the Bank of Polynesia chatbot, now knows more than 500 answers to common questions about banking. It has therefore become an essential ally for consultants who now also use it as a document base!


You can find Atea on the Bank of Polynesia website.

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