CUSTOMER service officers at DBS will soon be able to use a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant to serve customers more efficiently and effectively.
The virtual assistant, named CSO Assistant, was developed in-house by the bank’s AI engineers, using a large-language model tailored to local languages and parlance with voice telephony and speech recognition capabilities.
It will transcribe customer queries in real life and do “live” searches on DBS’ knowledge base to quickly retrieve information, so that relevant solutions can be delivered more speedily, said the bank on Thursday (Jul 18).
CSO Assistant will also help with post-call documentation by providing instant call summaries and pre-filling service request fields, said DBS.
The programme will be rolled out by the end of 2024 for DBS’ 500 customer service officers in Singapore. The bank will progressively launch CSO Assistant in its other markets over the next year, starting with Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Based on data collected since pilots for CSO Assistant began in October 2023, it has a transcription and solutioning accuracy of nearly 100 per cent. When deployed, DBS expects it to help reduce call handling time by up to 20 per cent.
Furthermore, close to 90 per cent of customer service officers involved in the pilot reported that the virtual assistant had a positive impact on their workflow. They also expressed confidence in leveraging CSO Assistant in the longer term as a co-pilot, DBS said.
DBS chief data and transformation officer Nimish Panchmatia highlighted that CSO Assistant is a prime example of how the bank leverages generative AI innovatively to “remove toil in the way we work”.
“(This) in turn enables our people to enhance customer journeys and deliver differentiated customer outcomes,” said Panchmatia. “We see gen AI as a co-pilot to supercharge our employees, and our immediate focus has been on driving efficiency gains and quality improvement.”
Shares of DBS closed at S$36.90 on Thursday, down 1 per cent or S$0.38, before the announcement.
