Nuance Communications & Commonwealth Bank - Innovative Use of Technology in Customer

Name of Organization / Company: Nuance Communications & Commonwealth Bank
Category: Award for the Innovative Use of Technology in Customer Service > Financial Services Industries

Entry Title: Facilitating personalised experiences and increased customer satisfaction through Ceba, CBA’s virtual assistant.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is one of Australia’s leading providers of personal banking, business and institutional banking and share broking services. CBA has partnered with Nuance Communications over the last four years to build and deliver innovative technology solutions to assist customers – including CBA’s innovative virtual assistant, named ‘Ceba’.

Ceba is powered by Advanced Machine Learning and Conversational Artificial Intelligence through Nuance’s Digital Customer Engagement Platform and learns and improves with every interaction – enabling it to become a more sophisticated and mature digital assistant to meet the needs of the ever-evolving Australian population.

With the acceleration of digital banking (CBA’s digitally active customers increased to 7.5 million in December 2020, up 10 per cent since December 2018), customers are looking for a digital solution to answer their queries. This is only being amplified by the current pandemic, with families increasingly concerned about not being able to make their home loan repayments on time.

Our solution

Over the last few years CBA has evolved Ceba significantly to be a market-leading chat bot that can instantaneously recognise, decipher, understand and answer more than 450 types of various customer enquiries.

Ceba is now programed to be able to:

• action the task required to answer a customer’s enquiry;
• direct a customer to the relevant digital feature that enables them to complete their enquiry via self-service; or
• triaging the enquiry to a human agent where required.

Ceba also has the ability to triage chats to call centres when enquiries need to be handled by a human customer service agent, while providing the agent with background information to save time.

Core values of Ceba include:

• its capacity to handle many conversations at once;
• its ability to resolve customer queries quickly; and
• its provision of a self-service digital channel.

When Ceba was first launched, the typical customer enquiry types were about activating cards, checking account balances, making payments, or getting cardless cash. Over time Ceba has matured to understand 90% of customer enquiries. For example, in the first three months Ceba understood 120 different enquires, and now with new content added every week, Ceba understands over 450+ enquiry types, with those enquiries now answered in a few seconds. Ceba is regularly able to provide solutions quicker than traditional call centres and can handle more than 50 conversations at the same time, while being consistent in its answers.

At times last year CBA saw a 1,000% increase in customer enquiries in Ceba, typically relating to relevant coronavirus support, suspending or deferring repayments and general financial assistance enquiries. In response, CBA was able to update Ceba’s answers almost in real time, as well as monitor the questions to ensure Ceba could successfully answer all the enquiry types. Customers chatting to Ceba were guided to Coronavirus support, financial assistance or given the ability to suspend repayments online – all the time in the digital channels without the need to talk to call centre staff.

Results/Metrics

• There have been more than 13 million customer conversations in Ceba to date since July 2018, with an average of ~500k per month
• Ceba’s biggest ever month was March 2020, with 581k conversations – ~457k of those about suspending or deferring payments
• Ceba now understands ~90% of customer inputs and last year was able to handle ~60% of conversations, with ~30% having to be passed to a human
• ~70,000 different customer questions are understood by Ceba
• Over two thirds of customers using Ceba last year told CBA they would have used the call centres or branches instead if Ceba wasn’t available
• NPS customer service scores from the chat channel not only held consistent in 2020, but in some instances increased over peak Coronavirus periods.

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=AW_-mUl0EaE&feature=youtu.be
https://www.commbank.com.au/support/ceba.html
https://www.nuance.com/en-gb/omni-channel-customer-engagement/digital.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=fAVLKo_-WAA&list=PLRFp5KqXtQ6y4xCwJjbeKzURoRA7oed7T&index=13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=tLcOvFTiObI&list=PLRFp5KqXtQ6y4xCwJjbeKzURoRA7oed7T&index=4