The largest cooperative financial institution in Brazil, Sicredi (link resides outside of ibm.com) currently serves more than seven million members. Recognized as the leader for customer experience in its sector, Sicredi is always looking for new ways to improve its customer service and member experience.

Each support representative at Sicredi is responsible for answering questions on a wide range of products. When a member reaches out in person or over the phone, the support rep is accountable for promptly and thoroughly resolving their query. Given the wide range of products they support, these representatives rely on a digital assistant to compile information to answer each member query. Given the previous configuration of the assistant, support representatives often needed to escalate a query to a product specialist in order to get it fully resolved. This contributed to longer wait times for members and a frustrating experience for support reps. This is why Sicredi has chosen to partner with IBM^® Client Engineering to augment its support representatives’ efforts using generative AI.

Sicredi spent three weeks co-creating the new assistant with IBM, and then spent 20 days testing it. Because the new assistant is enabled by the IBM watsonx.ai^™, IBM Watson^® Discovery and IBM watsonx Assistant solutions, Sicredi’s team can submit a wide range of questions (varying in complexity) in natural language. Then the assistant will query Sicredi’s support documentation and generate an answer within a matter of seconds.

Over the course of the 20-day pilot, Sicredi’s support representatives served 6,500 members who reached out with questions about Sicredi’s consortium product. Compared to the previous month’s customer support query data for that product, before the pilot began, Sicredi observed the following results:

• 10%–12% improvement in retention, which are cases where the support rep resolved the member’s query without involving a product specialist
• 1% improvement in net promoter score
• 8% decrease in abandonment of support calls due to wait time

Additionally, the team found that their average time to resolve customer queries decreased during the pilot. The next step for Sicredi, following the pilot, is to begin expanding the bot’s scope to include all other financial products. “We are encouraged by the results of this pilot, and we look forward to the next chapter in our generative AI journey. IBM’s ethical and transparent approach to AI helps us put human values at the center of our transformation initiative, ensuring that AI is applied fairly and responsibly across our business, while it improves our members’ experience,” explains Alceu Meinen, Superintendent of AI and Customer Relations at Sicredi.

Sicredi (link resides outside of ibm.com) is the first cooperative financial institution in Brazil. Their business model builds a value chain that benefits the member, the cooperative and the local community.