GM Financial to add voice integration to Nanci chatbot
Nanci currently handles 50% of customer service inquiries received through messaging
GM Financial, the captive lender for General Motors, is giving its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, Nanci, a voice.
The captive recently began a program with technology provider Genesys to implement the lender’s call center as a service platform, GM Financial Executive Vice President and Chief Experience Officer Bob Beatty said at the Auto Finance Innovation Summit yesterday. “The very first use case — the MVP — and where we’re going to be putting our efforts, is giving Nanci a voice.”
“Basically, we’re introducing Nanci into the telephone [interactive voice response] channel,” Beatty said, noting that the chatbot’s voice would be “introduced in the coming months,” but did not provide a more specific timeline.
Nanci, which was first launched in late 2019 and is powered by IBM Watson technology, was handling more than 50% of customer inquiries received through the captive’s messaging platform by April, Beatty said.
At the height of the pandemic, GM Financial, like the rest of the auto finance industry, had to react quickly as customer service inquiries mounted. “We deployed everyone home, and we didn’t have enough phone agents, so we had to channel everything through messaging,” Beatty said. “Then, we didn’t have enough messaging agents that were trained in messaging — but we had Nanci.”
Beatty said IBM helped GM Financial with its goal to create iterative improvements to the chatbot on its own. “There’s the power of these relationships,” he said.
Still, rapidly scaling the chatbot was no easy feat. “That was the result of a whole bunch of people working through multiple nights: analyzing the unstructured data, identifying the intents, getting the copy written, doing the quality assurance.
“It was an incredible effort and a complete gamechanger for us,” Beatty explained. “Nanci’s about to go on another journey.”
GM Financial had a managed portfolio of $100.2 billion at yearend, including commercial and consumer auto loans.
This article originally appeared in our sister publication, Auto Finance News.
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