VakıfBank - Innovative Use of Technology in Customer Service
Company: VakıfBank
Company Description: VakıfBank has commenced its operations on the 13th of April 1954. At its inception, the Bank’s mission was to set as managing and utilizing the assets of foundations in the most efficient manner in line with the needs of the economic development, contributing to Turkey’s increasing savings rate based on a management and working understanding aligned with the requirements of modern banking.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for the Innovative Use of Technology in Customer Service - Financial Services Industries
Nomination Title: ViBi - Intelligence that listens, understands and does
VakıfBank is the fourth largest bank in Turkey with its 16,743 employees, 4,267 ATMs and 935 branches.
In October 2019 we presented our virtual assistant ViBi, which can communicate with users interactively and also provide the most accurate guidance for banking transactions which 94% of them are realized through non-branch channels.
ViBi is not just an artificial intelligence. It is intelligence that listens, understands and does. It is the best assistant to understand its user. In everyday life, no matter how loud and crowded is your location or whatever your speed and style of speaking is, ViBi makes sense of what you say and keeps transacting. Briefly, ViBi can understand you as well as a person you meet for the first time and use the same language.
In addition, ViBi can easily learn its own shortcomings by analyzing the user's statements periodically.
When a transaction that cannot be completed through the mobile application is requested, it is connected to the live mobile support team immediately by providing live support service with the agent, ensures the transactions made even if it is not completed as self-service.
It follows user habits and uses them for further transactions. It provides on-site use of data and smart algorithms.
Our customers can perform almost 300 transactions with ViBi, which works integrated with VakıfBank Mobile without needing for branches and call centers. Providing service with both written and voice, ViBi constantly improves itself by considering user habits.
During the 6-month construction phase of ViBi, a team of 13 people, 5 of whom were engineers, worked. To ensure that ViBi can correctly interpret what customers with different speech styles are saying, the language model used in the application was trained with a voice recording of 210,000 words and it can answer over 5,000 questions with a rate of 94%.
Having an average of 145,000 interactions daily, ViBi is among the pioneers of the industry. Until September 2020, a total of 3,600,000 customers have completed their transactions, our customers checked their balances 7,500,000 times and 8,500,000 loan applications were received through ViBi.
ViBi, which contributes positively to VakıfBank brand value, reduced the burden of our call centers and branches as it enables our customers to perform their transactions quickly with voice. When we look at the 6-month call center data covering before and after the ViBi launch, we see that the functions in our transaction set are realized through ViBi at a rate of 7% after the launch.
205,635 people interacted with ViBi on October 29, the launch day. 50,554 people made 194,008 financial transactions or inquiries. Approximately 2,000,000 people corresponding to 60% of customers who have logged into VakıfBank Mobile since the day it was commissioned have met ViBi. The usage rate of our customers who have met with ViBi has approached 30%.
Again since the launch, VakıfBank customers have interacted with ViBi approximately 7,700,000 times.
ViBi usage has increased significantly during COVID-19 restrictions, when digital banking has become a necessity. This contributed to the bank's provision of customer service without any interruptions and it received almost 420,000 thanks from the day it was launched.