The National Australia Bank has launched what it claims is Australia’s first virtual banker for business, with the solution designed to enable business customers to receive instant answers and assistance with common banking questions and tasks.
NAB says the virtual assistant’s artificial intelligence is derived from thousands of real-life customer inquiries and there are more than 13,000 variants of the 200 questions the virtual banker can answer.
And if the question can’t be answered, the customer will then be directed to a human banker.
According to NAB, its customers were involved in the testing and development phase of the virtual banker solution, with more than 75% saying a virtual banker was a highly desirable offering that would help them with their banking needs.
{loadposition peter}NAB chief operating officer Antony Cahill said the development of the virtual banker continued NAB’s commitment to providing “leading solutions that make life easier for customers”.
“Our research shows that two-thirds of Australian SMEs cite dealing with administrative tasks as taking a lot of effort, and our customers desperately want to spend more time on their business and less time on dealing with admin tasks.
“’We’re working hard to make banking an easy and supportive experience for our customers and technology like this helps save business customers critical time. When they have a question about their banking, our virtual banker is there to help solve it 24 hours a day, seven days a week; it’s a simple and seamless on-the-go experience.”
Cahill says NAB will continue to develop the virtual banker over coming months to enable an even broader and more diverse range of instant answers and guidance for business customers.
Part of NAB’s delivery of new customer self-assistance also includes walk-through tutorial videos for NAB Connect users.
Cahill says the short step-by-step videos help customers understand how they can use and take advantage of the platform’s wide capabilities, with tutorials that help with common tasks like adding users or setting up reoccurring payments.
“The initiatives are just two examples of the many that have been developed by NAB’s Customer Journey teams, who are reimagining specific customer experiences.
“We currently have a number of different streams of work underway with almost 1000 employees across various areas of the bank — from bankers, to product specialists, marketing experts and technologists — working together on these projects and delivering at pace.”