How DBS Bank's Kai Virtual Banking Chatbot Is Setting A New Benchmark In Customer Service

IN THE last two years, the Kai virtual banking assistant has been able to handle 80% of the queries received by the bank with close to 80% accuracy. This has led to a reduction in the call centre hiring

- Abhishek Raval

“We not only see Private or Public Banks as our competitors but also see our competitor landscape as expanding to include many other fintech companies. And in fact, many of them have adopted UPI payment interfaces into their platforms which is a direct service that is in competition to ours. We see their biggest advantage as their knowledge on how to achieve mega-scale, i.e getting to a billion customers or more at a rapid pace, and they are religious about customer experience,” says Alfian Sharifuddin, MD- Head of Technology and Operations, DBS Bank.

As one can see from Sharifuddin’s quote above, two years ago, technology platform scalability and customer experience was the focus for DBS Bank, while launching Digi Banking in India. In other words, as the customer count grew, the bank did not want to see itself scaling up with manual, non Straight Through Processing (STP) processes. For example, there should not be any corresponding increase in the staff irrespective of the rate at which the customer base is increasing.

The bank was looking for tools, processes and capabilities available in the market that would help to meet this need across all the functions. Kai Banking fitted DBS Bank's expectations. The platform is AI enabled and can do voice and text communication with the customer. All the major FAQs like balance check; branch opening hours; how to open a bank account; queries regarding upgrades; what to do if the debit card is lost etc from the customer can be answered with relative ease by the platform without going into the chain of multiple clicks or standardised short code formats. The platform is intelligent to understand what's being asked. There is no need for asking in specified formats. Certain keywords does the work for the AI enabled chatbot.

Chatbot has delivered satisfactory numbers