Making chatbots more human to understand customer needs better

Do you remember your last interaction with an online chatbot? Was it a pleasant experience, or did it end in frustration? Displeasure with chatbots usually stem from the irritation of talking to chatbots that don’t understand your requests and provide pre-determined answers that might not be helpful.

The team that developed JOY Chatbot, DBS’ corporate banking virtual assistant, made it their mission to inject empathy into JOY. This meant that JOY needed to understand user emotions through sentiment analysis and contextual servicing.

We sat down with Bayu Febriajie (pictured below), who heads the JOY team, to find out more about creating joyful customer experiences with chatbots.

Why are chatbots important for online customer engagement?

In the crowded world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and Big Data, we anticipated the digital shift in customer experiences and developed JOY in April 2018. It was necessary to build an intelligent virtual assistant for corporate banking to provide exceptional and scalable digital experiences for both our corporate and retail our customers.

Can you share some successes of JOY since its launch?

The year of 2019 was extraordinary for us. We won four global and regional awards since we launched, including Global Finance’s Payment Innovators 2019 and The Banker 2019’s Tech Projects of the Year (AI & Robotics).

We calculated that JOY currently has the knowledge to handle over 80% of our total customer corporate enquiries, including more than 300 frequently asked questions (FAQ). We’ve seen a 128% increase in monthly users who are new to chatbots, and we’re saving around 34% of calls on a monthly basis.

Team JOY presenting their Sentiment Analysis Machine to participants of the DBS Asia X Fintech Festival Lab Crawl 2019.

That’s great! So what sets JOY apart from the other chatbots out there?

JOY is different from other chatbots because it is distinct to DBS and stays committed to our service standard of being respectful, easy to deal with and dependable. Our vision is to be the Chatbot of Choice with Soul and Empathy for Customers’ Banking Services and Financial Needs.

Tell us more about the enhancements to JOY that’s helping to realise this vision.

Over the past year, JOY has gained additional capabilities. We prioritised new features based on feedback from customers and colleagues.

One of our key enhancements is contextual servicing capabilities, powered by customer science. JOY can proactively offer customers an immersive and hyper-personalised customer experience. Leveraging customer insights, feedback, AI, data-driven analytics and machine learning, we can provide more relevant content, product, and service information in line with user behaviour.

We have also looked at evolving our chatbot’s conversational customer experience to enable easier guidance, powered by additional guided conversations, deep links and FAQs. We also enhanced language capabilities to include English and Traditional Chinese support for our chatbot’s user interface in Hong Kong.

Evolution of our Chatbot’s User Interface

How did the team embark on these enhancements?

Our team is a strong advocate of being customer-obsessed. We often placed ourselves in our customers’ shoes and focus on their experiences with us. A customer’s journey isn’t fixed at a simple point, but rather consists of their experiences from start to end. We adopted a human-centred approach across our entire team, focusing on the perspective of our customers instead of the limitations of our current systems and processes.

We invited our customers to validate our design and hypothesis, treating them as part of our team with the eventual aim having them as advocates. This enabled us to understand the needs of our customers and therefore placed them at the heart of the DBS banking experience. Working together with our end-users allowed us to uncover new insights and embrace a customer-centric approach when designing new features.

You worked with a UNI.CORN+ team on these enhancements. How did they contribute to this project?

Our winning UNI.CORN+ interns came up with the solution that empowers JOY to empathise with our customers — the Sentiment Analysis Machine. With sentiment analysis, we came close to creating the ultimate version of JOY, spearheading the innovation revolution. Thanks to them, we are able to make JOY more human, assessing responses to ‘empathise’ with each customer to deliver personalised communication.

Team JOY with their winning interns from the UNI.CORN+ programme.

Can you share your favourite non-DBS chatbot or solution that you think is innovative?

The Mitsuku chatbot, a record-breaking five-time winner of the Loebner Prize Turing Test, is probably the world’s best conversational chatbot. We are amazed at how it manages to tackle any kind of question you throw at it. We learned a lot from interacting with it.

JOY Chatbot is DBS’ corporate banking virtual assistant, created to assist small-to-medium enterprises on their corporate banking enquiries. It was one of the solutions featured at the DBS Asia X Fintech Festival Lab Crawl 2019 attended by more than 540 participants.