How Can Enterprise Banks Improve Customer Service? An Axis Bank Story

Hi folks,?

We often wonder how enterprise businesses remain cost-efficient even with rising client expectations. So, we looked at one of the largest banks in India and how they became cost-efficient with an AI-powered customer service platform.?

Axis Bank, one of the largest consumer banks in India, incorporated an AI customer service agent in 2018. Back then, there were no large language models or generative AI, but they had a pressing problem they needed to solve, and they built their own solution.?

Axis Bank had a long-standing problem that was holding them back. Their customer service systems were outdated, and they had noticed a few trends:

1. They needed to increase headcount and contract additional third-party email and call center management vendors to scale customer service.
2. The email support channel had historically low customer satisfaction scores because of slow response times.
3. It was hard to scale their customer support channels to match up with the growth in the business.

That’s why, in 2018, Axis Bank was one of the first movers to build an AI chatbot. Their principle was simple. As Praveen Bhatt, the Head of Digital Banking and Customer Experience, said, “The idea is to convert these bots to the personal Relation Managers (RMs) for the entire mass. We are aggressively focusing on personalization to stay relevant to the customer, rather than targeting them through just emails that are generic in nature.”

These basic principles around digitization and customer-centricity paid off; they achieved:

• 100% growth in mobile app transactions
• 9% increase in digitally active customers
• All-time-high positive ratings on Google Play Store
• 76% reduction in third-party customer service headcount

Now, we know that this process worked for Axis Bank. However, this case study also outlines a common problem for enterprise banks.

Enterprise banks face a few customer service problems:

• Slow responses to customers
• Slow resolution
• Low customer satisfaction scores

Enterprise banks have a vast customer base (SBI Bank, the largest Indian bank, serves over 500 million customers), complicating managing customer service at scale.?

An AI-based 360-degree customer service platform is a cost-effective and efficient method to increase the scale of customer support in these organizations. Here, we can get some idea about implementing AI into the workflow by following Axis Bank’s example.

Deploying AI-powered Customer Service to 500 Million Customers

Axis Bank provides a brilliant implementation framework through which enterprise banking businesses can deploy AI customer service to their customers. The steps are:

1. Generating New Data - Axis Bank used its customer service communications to create data on which AI could be trained.
2. Repeated Training Periods - The bank updated its AI platform every 15 days to adjust to financial regulations and banking-specific workflows.?
3. Manually Testing Each Interaction - Since the platform didn’t use generative AI, external developers tested each interaction before it was deployed to customers.?
4. Customer Service Focus - After every launch, the customer support team was always available to answer customer questions in case the AI failed to answer a question, or there was confusion.?

You don’t have to wait weeks to develop your solutions today. Multiple solutions let you deploy an AI-powered customer service solution across your entire customer base in days. For example, when we onboard an enterprise business on Kommunicate, we take the following steps:

1. Dynamically Scrape Data (Automated) - We use our URL scraper and Document reader to feed all relevant data to our customer service platform.?
2. Training (Automated) - Our customer service platform automatically trains the AI agents to respond to customers.?
3. Testing for Accuracy - Our team manually runs checks to see the accuracy of the answers so that you don’t have to.?
4. Managing Agent Handoff (Automated) - Our customer service platform automatically transfers complicated issues to human agents.?

As you can see, modern 360-degree customer service platforms like Kommunicate can help you build customer service agents without incurring a high cost. We also have plug-and-play integrations that let you directly deploy your AI agents to use it for customers.?

We’ve just launched an email support platform that can reduce your email volumes by 80%. If that interests you, feel free to ask for early access.?

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