Robot Anna the answer at Sberbank’s client contact centre
Russia’s Sberbank has begun robotising its contact centre for corporate clients with a robot that can answer questions about the location of the bank’s branches and ATMs.
Called Anna, the robot helps in a variety of ways as only machines can. Enquiries that require human employee participation are processed using robot-based technology in the form of a cognitive virtual assistant. The robot analyses the conversation between the operator and the client and automatically provides the former with additional information to help assist the client.
Sberbank says the pilot project saw an increase of client service speed in (unnamed) “specific” areas by 50%. Now its clients spend an average of 3.5 minutes on the phone to the corporate client contract centre.
Anatoly Popov, SVP and head of Sberbank’s corporate business block, says its goals include “significantly reducing the average time of servicing, increasing the share of first call resolutions, and robotising the system for processing all simple client enquiries in the next two years”.
If you crave more stats, then around 40% of enquiries made to Sberbank’s corporate client contact centre involve information requests. Every day the centre’s operators process around 20,000 calls. In addition, around two million major, medium-sized and small businesses account for Sberbank’s corporate clients.
In the future, Sberbank says the robot will provide other information, such as payment statuses, account balances and writs of execution.
Earlier this month, we featured Sberbank in a case study – and how it benchmarks its performance against technology companies not other banks.
