The biggest public sector lender in the country State Bank of India (SBI) has launched its own chatbot to handle queries pertaining to bank’s retail products.
This is first of its kind initiative taken by the bank in terms of Artificial Intelligence and has been named as SBI Intelligent Assistant (SIA).
The chatbot has been designed to answer customer inquiries in terms of home loans, education loans, car loans, personal loans, recurring deposits and term deposits. Chatbots are digital robots that can carry on a conversation through audio or text. Mrutyunjay Mahapatra, deputy MD and chief information officer at SBI, told FE that the decision to introduce a chatbot was taken as it was felt that navigating the website could be a bit of a task for a customer.
“The decision to introduce a chatbot was taken as it was felt that navigating the website could be a bit of a task for a customer,” said Mrutyunjay Mahapatra, Deputy Managing Director and Chief Information Officer at SBI.
“Most of the time, customer touchpoints with the bank are for three things — sales, service and enquiry,” Mahapatra said.adding, “We found that for enquiry and navigation, a customer has to navigate quite a bit or go to call centres, where the agent may not be fully
“We found that for enquiry and navigation, a customer has to navigate quite a bit or go to call centres, where the agent may not be fully knowledgeable,” he explained.The chatbot was developed by Allincall, a start-up backed by IIT Bombay, and uses machine learning and
The chatbot has been powered by Allincall, a start-up backed by IIT Bombay on behalf of SBI. It uses machine learning and bot experience to respond to the customer queries.
