The Next Wave Of Conversational Platforms

Though Chatbots or conversational platforms are being tested and used in various forms from 60's, its only in recent years that we have completely embraced this in our everyday life whether asking Alexa for the next song or Siri for the weather update or EVA for all banking queries on the HDFC website and getting satisfied by the responses for most part.

- Rajnish Khare

This broad based acceptance of chatbots as a medium of interaction in banking has been made possible by a combination of factors

a) Technology progress in the area of natural language processing (NLP) is making the conversations more human like

b) CPU power and network capacity continue to increase exponentially

c) Availability of large number of Bots trained and configured on specific use data and knowledge source thereby increasing the accuracy of understanding of intent and response many fold

d) Open banking architecture is powering these bots with multiple APIs making real time access to information and updates possible with no or negligible lag.

At HDFC Bank our own conversational platform EVA in last 3 years has been able to successfully complete 13mn + customer conversations on our website with current accuracy of around 95%. Eva is also empowering the employees in their quest for information while serving customers. Eva today is seamlessly connected with Alexa, Google assistant, Whatsapp and many other bank’s internal systems. Through EVA our customers can also access e-commerce sites and do mobile recharge, ticket booking etc.