ICICI Bank Leverages Ipal Chatbot For Customer Service

ICICI BANK’S AI POWERED iPal chatbot has interacted on the bank’s website and mobile application with close to 3.1 million customers, addressing 6 million queries with nearly 90% accuracy in eight months (Feb – Sept 2017).

- Abhishek Raval

ICICI Bank has implemented the AI powered iPal chatbot. It has clocked 6 million responses till date with a run rate of 1 million chats per month. “Interestingly, the numbers are on par with the volumes hitting the call centre,” says Madhivanan Balakrishnan, Chief Technology Digital Officer, ICICI Bank. The chatbot, now on a learning curve, handles customer queries on the website and mobile banking application, and offers instant resolution. ICICI claims it is the only bank in the country to offer chatbot services on its mobile banking application, iMobile. In addition to offering instant responses to queries, the iPal engine on iMobile undertakes financial transactions as well – an industry first feature. It enables customers to undertake financial transactions like bill pay, fund transfer and recharges. iPal is also available on Pockets, a digital bank on mobile phone, which also incorporates an ewallet.

“We have taken a few initiatives in the AI/ML space, which will be scaled up from two perspectives - customer experience and efficiency and productivity improvement of the employees. Thus these technologies will help both the customer and the bank,” says Balakrishnan.

iPal was rolled out early this year on two of the primary applications- ICICI Bank website and iMobile application. The iMobile app is used by 6 million customers with a high ratio of active usage.