DBS is set to introduce a Gen AI-powered virtual assistant to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of its Customer Service Officer (CSO) workforce in Singapore.
The initiative, named “CSO Assistant,” will be implemented by the end of 2024 and aims to benefit the bank’s more than 250,000 monthly consumer and corporate customers.
The CSO Assistant has been developed entirely in-house by DBS’s AI engineers. It integrates a Large Language Model that is tailored to local languages and parlance, combined with voice telephony and speech recognition capabilities. This enables the virtual assistant to transcribe customer queries in real-time and perform live searches through the bank’s knowledge base to quickly retrieve relevant information. The goal is to allow CSOs to provide more rapid and accurate solutions. Additionally, the assistant helps with post-call tasks by generating instant call summaries and pre-filling service request forms.
According to data collected since the pilot phase began in October 2023, the CSO Assistant has demonstrated near 100% accuracy in transcription and solution provision. When fully deployed, the tool is expected to reduce call handling times by up to 20%. Nearly 90% of CSOs who participated in the pilot reported that the assistant positively impacted their workflow, expressing confidence in its long-term utility as a co-pilot.
Nimish Panchmatia, Chief Data and Transformation Officer at DBS, commented, “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. CSO Assistant is a prime example of how we leverage Gen AI innovatively to remove toil in the way we work, which in turn enables our people to enhance customer journeys and deliver differentiated customer outcomes. In developing CSO Assistant, we took a measured approach by stress-testing it against our responsible data use frameworks and iteratively enhancing it based on feedback received during the pilot.”
Indumathi Kunasegaran, a Singaporean CSO Team Lead at DBS, noted, “CSO Assistant has helped remove repetitive tasks from our daily work. It has also freed up bandwidth for my team and I to engage our customers more deeply as we deliver solutions more intelligently and efficiently.”
In addition to its rollout in Singapore, DBS plans to introduce CSO Assistant to other markets over the next 12 months, starting with Taiwan and Hong Kong. The CSO Assistant is one of over 20 Gen AI use cases that DBS is implementing, having been identified from a pool of over 240 ideas generated internally in 2023. Another initiative benefiting DBS employees is DBS-GPT, a Gen AI program similar to ChatGPT that assists with content generation and writing tasks in a secure environment. DBS-GPT is currently available to over 25,000 employees across the bank.
DBS remains committed to leveraging advanced technologies to improve internal operations and service delivery. The integration of Gen AI tools such as CSO Assistant and DBS-GPT reflects the bank’s strategy to enhance efficiency and provide better customer outcomes across its various markets.
