Swedbank creates digital customer experience with Nina
Virtual assistant gets 78 percent first‑contact resolution within first three months.
Company profile
Swedbank is ‘a modern bank firmly rooted in Swedish savings bank history’. As one of Sweden’s largest retail banks, Swedbank has 8 million private, and more than 600,000 corporate and organizational customers; a leading position in its other home markets of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and a growing presence in the US and China. Swedbank plays an important role in the local communities it serves and works hard to develop close, long‑term relationships with its customers via an extensive retail network and well‑developed phone, internet and mobile services.
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Martin Kedbäck
Channel Management
Swedbank
Challenge
- Enable 2 million customer interactions per year to be quickly resolved through self‑service
- Allow all banking to be handled via self‑service on digital channels
- Free up contact center staff to focus on value‑added tasks
- Create a platform for new services to enhance customer experiences for an expanding digital user base
Solution
- Nina virtual assistant deployed to deliver personalized customer experiences
- Assists customers with information searches and basic transactions, including answering their questions and directing them to appropriate links or web forms
- Supports Swedbank's agents to speedily and efficiently answer customer queries
- Capabilities being extended to cover all of Swedbank's customers, its Mobile Bank and iPad Bank
Results
- Nina averaged over 30,000 conversations per month within just three months of being deployed
- Achieved 78% first‑contact resolution (FCR)
- Handles over 350 customer questions and answers, increasing the personalization of customer experiences
- Reduces the time taken people to find the information or transact the service they need
Background
In 2014, Swedbank handled 3.6 million customer interactions, more than two million of which were basic transactional queries. 58% of customers were banking with the company digitally; and 80% of customers logged into a digital channel at least once a month, including an average of more than 20 logins per month to Swedbank’s Mobile Bank.
Swedbank works hard to deliver customer experiences that suit its customers’ preferences and was looking for a simple and engaging way of helping customers to more easily search for information and answer basic transactional questions for themselves. The bank estimated that by 2018, digital channels will be its customers’ primary choice of contact with the bank, and so also wanted to ensure that all banking business can be handled via self‑service on digital channels.
A further business driver was to enable customer interactions involving Swedbank’s contact center agents to focus on sales rather than service. In 2014, the 3.6 million inbound interactions handled by the bank’s 700 contact center agents (spread across five sites) included having to deal with 500,000 emails and 10,000 social media interactions, and generate one million outbound responses. The more of these interactions that could be managed through self‑service, the more effective these resources would be
To help it address these issues, Swedbank considered a number of potential suppliers. The bank chose Nuance as a partner, not only because it offered an ideal solution to the issues Swedbank was looking to fix, but also because Nuance’s broad understanding of the bigger picture of customer experience could help the bank achieve its long-term goals. With almost 60% of its customer base already digital, Swedbank needed to evolve its presence in those channels, an area where it felt Nuance could really be of assistance.