Do you enjoy calling your bank and being “intercepted” by an IVRS that makes you press buttons for a few minutes till it puts you into a queue to wait for an agent attending to you? Yhea.. who doesn’t? That’s why team RICHA (Revolutionary & Intelligent Call Handling Assistant) took their frustration to the HSBCs Openlab Innovation Challenge and created a conversational AI that serves the customer immediately and without and queuing. It can provide information (e.g. account balance) but more importantly also execution actions (e.g. paying of your credit card balance) just listening to the customer’s request. No buttons pressed! The solution developed by a team of experts from HSBC and ReGov Technologies, a Malaysian Blockchain and AI innovator, convinced the panel of industry experts, thought leaders as well as regional HSBC leaders in the tech field to award the 1st place to the team. The HSBC Open Innovation Lab challenge saw 190 applications with a final group of 24 Malaysian & international teams pitching their excellent concepts & products.
During its demo RICHA ran smoothly and drew much admiration from the crowd. Simon Ulrich, CTO of ReGov Technologies, demonstrated how RICHA recognized him personally, let him check his account balance, pay off 2 credit card bills and recommended him an installment plan for his second credit card bill as it realized he has not enough funds in his account. Much to, amusement, the crowd the AI also reacted appropriately on him getting emotionally distressed during the call and got a more experienced (=human) agent involved.
This showed how easy phone banking could be in the future by just using voice commands and leveraging on existing transaction data. But as Simon Ulrich said during the presentation, “The most exciting thing about RICHA is that she not only learns to understand me better – my German accent being a tough challenge at first – but also learns what requests I make under which circumstances. If I always check my account balance at the end of the month after my salary was banked-in she suggest that to me as the very first action when I call her up at month end.”
This showed how easy phone banking could be in the future by just using voice commands and leveraging on existing transaction data. But as Simon Ulrich said during the presentation, “The most exciting thing about RICHA is that she not only learns to understand me better – my German accent being a tough challenge at first – but also learns what requests I make under which circumstances. If I always check my account balance at the end of the month after my salary was banked-in she suggest that to me as the very first action when I call her up at month end.”
With the actual prototype development work done by the ReGov Tech Team in less than three weeks, the team showed full confidence in RICHA being able to transform the contact centre experience not only in banking but also in many other industries and the public sector.
Winning the challenge was certainly a proud moment but more importantly, as Jude Dominic, the lead of team RICHA from HSBC said, “Who would like to join us in saving more than 1.6 million Ringgit every year and create new business opportunities?” – There is a strong business case for implementing a Revolutionary & Intelligent Call Handling Assistant.
