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Nationwide builds Covid chatbot

Nationwide Building Society has trained its virtual assistant Arti to handle common Covid-19 mortgage holiday queries.

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Nationwide builds Covid chatbot

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

A team made up of the Society’s mortgage, technology and AI specialists worked together on the project and were able to build, test and roll out the service in just four days.

Arti’s new abilities went live at the end of March, answering thousands of mortgage holiday queries within the first few days and continuing to respond to about 350 queries per day since.

The mortgage-support bot has subsequently been trained to also handle travel insurance and Visa dispute queries, which are growing in volume as the health crisis persists.

In addition to providing Arti with dialogue to respond with, the team also taught Arti to comprehend intent and understand how a similar question could be asked in several ways, to provide the best possible response.

Beverley Bartlett, senior digital manager at Nationwide, says: “The speed at which we delivered this new capability meant that frontline teams could spend their time dealing with more complex queries from our members. It means we can continue to serve our members in more ways, more quickly and effectively, but still with the added reassurance of the human touch, if needed, that our members value.”

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Comments: (1)

A Finextra member 

Interesting. The ability of bots/AI to learn effectively, and therefore adapt to change is key to their wider use.

Put simply, will the Bot 'get it', quicker than the staff. And therefore deliver a better/more consistent service.

Learning more about these sorts of use cases in action, being practically applied, would be really informative.

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