HDFC Bank’s Virtual Assistant – Ask EVA Qorus Banking Innovation Awards 2017

a. Concept and objectives HDFC Bank Virtual Agent engine is an automated customer engagement online chat platform which is based on artificial intelligence technology. HDFC Bank Virtual Agent engine with its unique “natural language” capabilities determines the correct taxonomy of the user’s input; pairing this with cognitive learning capabilities that extract, understand, and act upon user queries. b. Reasons behind Bank was incurring huge cost in servicing routine inquiries which had spiraled out of control. We had tried rules-based chat in hopes of reducing call volume but it couldn’t meet the bank’s goals for reducing costs. c. State of competition Currently there is no other bank which has implemented such an AI, NLP and Machine learning based chatbot on their website. Unlike regular chatbots available with other financial services providers, HDFC Bank Virtual Agent, dynamically generates personalized responses to customer queries. d. Sources of inspiration HDFC Bank Virtual Assistant was mainly inspired by AI bots like Alexa and iOS’s Siri where customers are able to use a chatbot for their activities. e. Departments involved Multiple teams involved in this project included the Digital Banking team, Marketing team, our customer service team, our Business Technology group as well as our IT team. f. Main results so far HDFC Bank Virtual Assistant is LIVE on HDFC Bank Website Portal Customer care tab since February’17. Since then, 3,11,000 total user sessions have been created so far. Around 9000 questions are getting answered every day using HDFC Bank Virtual Agent.