U.K.-based TSB Bank gave its customer service a five-day makeover in the midst of the global pandemic with the launch of its “Smart Agent” chat function, helped by its technology partner IBM Services.  

“We chose a platform that was cloud-enabled,” said Suresh Viswanathan, chief operating officer at TSB. “The bulk of the work was not repointing links from our website to Smart Agent. It was more about being comfortable with information security and data privacy.” 

The bank, which has $49.7 billion in assets, began using the tool to help customers struggling due to the coronavirus pandemic. For example, Smart Agent helps customers asking to pause repayments on mortgages, and personal and business loans. TSB launched Smart Agent on March 25, and the tool has handled 40,000 customer requests so far, with 250 bank employees working as agents. The human-digital approach uses a mixture of AI-powered chat features and human intervention when needed, which has reduced call center volume and branch traffic during the pandemic. 

Smart Agent can answer basic customer inquiries, like helping customers find online forms, but the tool will pass customers off to a human agent for more complicated issues, like determining creditworthiness. The tool will also notice if customers are becoming frustrated with the chatbot and intervene to pass them off to a human employee. Viswanathan said the 40,000 customer requests handled so far don’t include those automatically handled by the chatbots. Customers can use Smart Agent on a desktop for now, and TSB aims to launch a mobile version by the end of May.  

See also: With IBM, Bank of China takes aim at super apps

TSB is also adding new functionalities to Smart Agent so it can handle more general inquiries and function as a mainstream tool. Viswanathan said the bank will continue building out Smart Agent’s capabilities on the back end to handle a wider variety of customer issues. TSB’s work with IBM builds on a partnership signed in January that saw TSB hire the vendor to operate the bank’s technology infrastructure.  

TSB can authenticate customers through a combination of security questions, biometrics, and driver’s license and passport information. With this authentication, the bank can allow a wider variety of its employees to work through Smart Agent. The 250 employees serving as agents come from all areas of the bank and can serve customers from any place, including their own homes. Viswanathan said employees working at the branch can also jump in to help when they have down time. 

“IT capacity across the network can be used a lot better than it was historically,” Viswanathan said. “We have become much more efficient as an organization in how we use our colleagues.”