Emirates NBD Virtual Assistant (Eva) is the first-in-region natural voice recognition technology based automated phone banking assistant and also first-in-the world for Arabic language. Eva freed customers from the complex and frustrating maze of the touch-tone IVR; saving them considerable time and effort to get a solution for their issues.

IVR is increasingly reaching its optimisation levels in regards to digitisation and scalability, however the technology has never been well accepted among banks. It has huge limitations in the number of automations it can offer and the number of services that can be added to it. At the same time, it faces challenges with high call handling time, high abandoned calls and low customer experience, hence driving up operational cost and leading to brand and value erosion.

The bank’s key operational reason to choose phone banking optimisation as a starting point was to arrest increasing calls to agent due to a reduced digital containment rate, an indicator that measures the degree of end to end digital self-servicing.

Solution

EVA was designed in the lines of personal assistant like Apple's Siri, Google Now and FaceBook's M, however it has been enabled with full back end integrations for end to end banking fulfilment capabilities.

Eva is trained to deal with 150 skills which are the most common reasons why a customer calls in and this can be scaled further as needed. Conceptualised in 2015, Eva was launched in February 2017 and implemented across all major retail financial services helplines by June 2017. The assistant currently handles around 500,000 customer calls per month with a Recognition accuracy of around 90% for English and 86% for Arabic.

Business impact

Based on technology provided by Nuance, with EVA, IVR is not eliminated as it continues to run in the background, but the customer navigates through the channel by using simple voi...

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Keywords:Technology, Phone Banking Assistant, AI, IVR, Virtual Assistant