An AI at the information desk

Chatbots have just in times of crisis like the current boom. They relieve the burden on customer service and ensure that standard inquiries to the service center of companies and organizations are processed quickly. 

• Digital assistant for the service department of Fiducia & GAD IT AG
• Active since 2019
• BOTTO "reads" documents, manuals and information available in banking systems. It breaks down the contents into small semantic units
• On this basis he independently creates a keyword-based knowledge database
• This enables the system to automatically assign and process inquiries from bank employees.
• Technical foundations: Cognitive Services from Microsoft, Azure Cloud Services, Bot Framework.

Our customer, Fiducia & GAD IT AG, has been using a digital assistant for the service area since last year and feels well positioned with the new system even in these times of crisis. Until recently, this communication mainly took place via telephone, web forms or e-mail. Since the end of 2019, another service channel has been available in the financial group, which is currently providing excellent service in times of "remote work": the new digital service assistant called BOTTO. Fiducia & GAD IT AG was supported by adesso experts in the development of this chatbot. 

Since its successful launch at the beginning of the year, the virtual assistance system BOTTO has been answering various kinds of questions and thus relieves the general customer service. 

Fiducia & GAD IT AG is the IT service provider of the approximately 900 Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken of the cooperative financial group, which manage over 80 million bank accounts in Germany. The services range from data center operation and online banking procedures to consulting on bank-specific innovations. Every year, bank employees contact the customer service department of Fiducia & GAD with around 500,000 inquiries

The AI discipline of Machine Learning played a major role in the programming of BOTTO: The assistant was trained to "read" all documents, manuals and information available in the banking systems, to break them down into small semantic units and to independently create a keyword-based knowledge database from them. On this basis, BOTTO can automatically assign and process the requests of bank employees that come in via a web interface.

A successful test phase lasting several weeks before the general introduction of the system showed that the average processing time per request was reduced by three minutes thanks to BOTTO. This relieves the IT service provider's hotline and shortens customer waiting times.

In the meantime, it has been impressively demonstrated that an application like BOTTO can play to its strengths in the business environment of Fiducia & GAD IT AG: Large case numbers, complex topics and extensive text information, which is located in different places and is constantly updated, are typical characteristics of the situation in the company. And if the chatbot should have inquiries that it cannot clarify on its own, it is able to independently forward the corresponding service tickets to the responsible specialists in the company. Simply because he has the knowledge for it.

In the coming months adesso will also accompany the further development and maturing of BOTTO.