(Updated January 21) In their efforts to “delight” customers, if not just retain them, banks and financial services companies around the world are engaged in “customer experience transformation” initiatives. While Opus Research strongly believes that Enterprise Intelligent Assistants (EIAs) should be at the heart of such efforts, we recognize that, on the technical level, the IA landscape spans smart UIs (chat, voice response, gesture and emotion detection, avatars, etc), natural language understanding, deep learning and ultimately artificial intelligence.

More importantly, at the very human level, Customer Experience Transformation initiatives span every department that can serve as, or merely support, the multiplicity of customer touch points. Customer care specialists in contact centers that support both chat and voice-based conversations are at the front line. But they must be aided and abetted by an IT department that is proficient in change management, knowledge management and, ultimately, scripting of real-time conversations that take place through text-based chat and speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) systems. These are the conversational front-ends to customer relationship management (CRM) systems as well as business intelligence (BI) and knowledge management (KM) resources.

If this sounds complicated, it is because it is… very complicated. In the world of financial services and banking, customer experience transformation is subject to constraints and strictures governed by industry regulations that protect individual privacy, prevent fraud and protect each individual’s savings. That’s why Atos has entered the market with a cloud-based solution, following a SaaS service delivery and consumption model and presented as a packaged Digital Customer Experience Transformation (DCXT) platform.

As one of the top system integrators in the world – especially now that it completed its acquisition of Unify, formerly Siemens Enterprise Communications – Atos has  the human resources, intellectual property (IP) and partnering strategy to make the transformation platform a reality, all residing in the proverbial Cloud (albeit in a security hardened platform). At the center of the DCXT is the Business Data and Analytics Platform™ or BDaAP.  It is a “Big Data” play, designed to aggregate huge amounts of structured or unstructured data and make it available for analytical purposes.

The rest of the DCXT is based on integration of solutions from well-selected partners. For example,  BackBase, a company specializing in omnichannel customer experience portals for banks, is a preferred partner for DCXT. Backbase’s solutions have been incorporated into the customer (and employee) facing digital delivery systems for ABN AMRO, Bank Hapoalim, Barclays, ING and others. Atos and BackBase forged a partnership dating to November 2013.

Yodlee, which provides a personal finance platform in the cloud, is another partner, providing a key piece of the DCXT service. Atos well understands the need to protect each banking customer’s privacy and insure that he or she has direct control over how and when such information may be shared. Yodlee operates as an aggregator of financial information from a number of sources. With the customer’s permission, it can know the UserID and authentication information to gain access to banks, card issuers and other financial institutions. That, in turn, enables individuals to understand and manage their finances and financial activity in a single place.

The third major partner in the DCXT is Creative Virtual. V-Person, its Enterprise Intelligent Assistant, meaning that it is a resource that supports “natural language input” and is able to answer questions that customer pose, just as a live agent of financial advisor would. Those answers can be in the form of text responses, instructive videos and delivery of relevant documents. Together, the partners provide a the components of a complete platform that is secure, compliant with privacy laws and highly responsive to banking customers’ most pressing needs.

Atos has developed dozens of “customer stories” or use cases for the DCXT, but is showcasing the financial planning based on stated goals first. In this instance, the customers can “chat” with an Intelligent Advisor over the Web and be transferred to a live advisor if or when needed. It helps in setting financial goals and then counsels the client about spending, investment objectives and the like. There are three more programmed use cases. A “full nest” scenario where a client can evaluate options for moving to a different house, taking into account specific neighborhoods (postal codes) and dynamic aggregation of housing prices. Wealth management is another use case, taking into account an individual’s objectives and positions taken (liquid versus non-liquid) and savings targets. The fourth instance surrounds decisionmaking for general insurance.

Opus Research sees 2015 as “The Year of the IA Integrator.” Customers now expect friction free, omnichannel self-service. Atos and many of its SI peers respond with solutions designed to remove the friction that accompanies efforts to bring Big Data, Analytics, Knowledge Management, Security, Privacy and Artificial Intelligence into play to assist individual customers. DCXT is an impressive exhibition of technological prowess and effective partnering that has the potential to accelerate the introduction of more IA-based customer facing services from financial institutions.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: customer experience, intelligent Assistants, partnerships