Creval Sistemi e Servizi (CSS) needed to reduce the human effort required for the internal service-support operations it provides for Credito Valtellinese (Creval), a banking group, to extend and improve those services.

In just six months, CSS launched Alfredo, an AI-powered virtual assistant, to deliver first-line service desk and back-office support to more than 360 bank branches.

Credito Valtellinese (Creval) is a midsized banking group in Italy that differentiates itself from its competitors through its attention to customer service and satisfaction. “We are very focused on customer delight and the customer relationship,” says Matteo Pizzicoli, Director of Banking Organization and Innovation at Creval Sistemi e Servizi (CSS), the IT service division of Creval. “The best way to delight our customers is to focus on service efficiency and cost reduction at the same time. What differentiates Creval is that we provide answers quickly to our customers. For example, we can give an answer to a customer asking us for a mortgage in less than 15 days. The average time for Italian banks is 30–60 days.”

Positioning itself as the “retail bank of the future,” Creval focuses on providing high-quality services and distinctive experiences for its customers, both in the digital and physical worlds. CSS delivers the behind-the-scenes IT services that help the bank achieve its customer service goals.

Over the past several years, CSS has invested in cutting-edge technology to support and automate many of its internal and external processes. For example, the department uses IBM® Business Process Manager systems for its Agile business process management (BPM) processes, allowing it to release new banking solutions in less than four hours. It has also made major investments in cognitive systems such as IBM Watson Analytics® technology to explore the big data in its CRM systems.

“At some point, we arrived at the conclusion that many of our processes are now very easy and very fast,” says Pizzicoli. However, some internal processes, such as the bank’s service desk support for bank branch employees, were neither automated nor efficient. Employees would call the service desk personnel, who would often answer the same questions or repeat the same processes throughout the day. “We wanted to focus on creating a solution to reduce or even eliminate the human effort in some of our more repetitive service desk support processes, so that our people could concentrate on the processes that add the most value to the bank—the ones that support its customers.”

Creval decided to transform the service model for its internal service desk operations. It envisioned an AI-enabled system that could interpret natural language text input and provide text-based responses, activate applications or connect to human assistance, as needed. The system would be trained on all banking help desk activities and every key knowledge field within the bank. CSS would design the system with continuous improvement in mind by using cognitive technology to allow the system to deepen its knowledge through use, and by measuring ongoing user satisfaction with the system.

Creval service desk and back-office personnel have a new colleague—Alfredo. The AI-powered virtual assistant has helped the bank significantly transform its operating model for service support. It has helped Creval achieve significant results by increasing the number of inquiries handled, extending service hours and reducing low-value, repetitive, human-centric activities.

Alfredo has helped reduce the number of calls fielded by back-office personnel by 80 percent. It has also reduced the efforts of service desk personnel by 40 percent—time that these employees can now spend on more complex inquiries. And 92 percent of users offered positive feedback after trying Alfredo, in part because it takes less time and effort to get an answer. According to Pizzicoli, “This is augmented intelligence backed by human support, because we want to focus on customer service and on giving each customer the right answer.”

Users don’t feel like they’re speaking with a typical chatbot because they can type their inquiries in natural language. And even when Alfredo needs to enlist human assistance, the experience continues seamlessly. “The user doesn’t have the impression that we are changing something, because they still remain in the same chat,” says Pizzicoli. “First, they speak to Alfredo and ask a few questions, and Alfredo says, ‘Okay, I will engage with colleagues of mine that are much more focused on that matter.’ And so Alfredo passes the chat on, via Skype, to someone who can answer the question.”

Alfredo can respond to more inquiries because it is not limited by personnel availability. It can also answer a nearly unlimited number of inquiries simultaneously, unlike the previous phone support system. “When there was an incident or problem with a system, our service desk used to receive a great number of phone calls, and we couldn’t answer all of them,” recalls Pizzicoli. Alfredo also works around the clock, instead of on a limited schedule like telephone support.

Pizzicoli sums up the value of Alfredo this way: “The cognitive system can reduce human effort and eliminate or reduce tasks that are repetitive and without value; this allows our people to be focused on the very high-value customer questions. For me, that’s really powerful.”

Far from fearing the takeover of their jobs by a machine, service desk personnel are pleased with their new colleague. They can now provide the high-value services for which they’re trained, instead of answering simple questions over and over. “The people on the service desk and in the back-office understand the value of this approach because they reduce the total time and effort they spend providing answers, so they can do other jobs with much greater value to the bank,” says Pizzicoli.

As an added bonus, the workers on the service desk now have a better atmosphere in which to work. “When they work with Alfredo on chat, it’s simpler and quieter,” says Pizzicoli. “There are no people all around them talking on the phone. This isn’t a call center—it’s knowledge workers providing technical support. Now people can concentrate and focus better on finding the answer they’re giving to the branch users.”

Alfredo continues learning from each chat experience, adding to its knowledge base with every encounter. Already trained on 14 internal knowledge areas of the bank, Alfredo is ready to take on external banking customers’ concerns in 2019. Bringing the system up to speed should not take long. “When we start to think about engaging external customers, we immediately understand that they are focused only on a few topics,” says Pizzicoli. “For internal customers, we had to create a very wide knowledge base on a lot of subjects. But the external customer has maybe 8 - 10 use cases that are really important.”

CSS intends to create a comprehensive customer service tool with Alfredo as the concierge. “We can integrate Alfredo with our Agile BPM system so that if the customer needs some action, Alfredo can start a service ticket in the chat,” says Pizzicoli. “Alfredo could also manage appointments, for example, making a customer appointment with the manager. Or, if the manager is available by chat, by connecting the customer directly with the manager.”

Pizzicoli expects that extending Alfredo’s functionality to external customers will directly improve their experience and satisfaction with the bank. “Furthermore,” he says, “we can use Watson Analytics to extract value from the information in the chat,” and use it to improve the bank’s CRM system.

The bank has combined its laser focus on customer service differentiation with its drive for technological innovation in Alfredo, and it’s being noticed. The bank received the 2018 Italian Banking Association (ABI) Award for Alfredo, for “operational innovation, digitalization and innovation of internal processes.” And Alfredo is just getting started.

Creval Sistemi e Servizi (CSS) is a fully owned subsidiary of Credito Valtellinese (Creval), a midsized banking group headquartered in Sondrio, Italy. CSS provides a range of services in areas such as IT, banking process optimization, back-office operations and real estate to the banking and the broader market. The Creval banking group has approximately 360 local branches in 11 regions, with almost 3,700 employees and total assets of EUR 26.6 billion as of September 2018. The bank’s customer base comprises primarily households, small and midsized businesses, artisans, professionals and nonprofit organizations.