HDFC Bank’s artificial intelligence-based chatbot ‘Eva’ has achieved the title of India’s largest chatbot, by successfully addressing over 2.7 million customer queries in just six months.
Built by Bengaluru-based Senseforth AI Research, EVA or Electronic Virtual Assistant was launched in March earlier this year on HDFC Bank’s official website. Since then, Eva has interacted with over 530,000 unique users and has addressed over 1.2 million queries.
Shridhar Marri, co-founder and CEO Senseforth, said in a statement, “Eva currently handles over 50,000 semantic variations for thousands of banking-related intents, tracks and analyses everyday customer issues and gains a deeper understanding of their behaviour patterns… Eva’s everyday interactions with users go through a conceptual banking knowledge framework which in turn enhances her ability to field more questions accurately. Eva never sleeps and her learning never stops.”
Two of the key technologies used to build Eva are Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI.
In an August 2016 interview, Ravi Narayanan, Country Head-Branch Banking and Retail Trade FX Business at HDFC Bank, had said that Eva was “not able to mine the data or information in such a way to create a user experience which will be a moment of truth for the customer”. But he had predicted that their association with Senseforth would bear fruit in only a few months. Now over a year later, Eva has an accuracy level of over 85 percent and up-time of 99.9 per cent.
HDFC Bank had launched Eva to make bank’s product details, fees and charges for various products, application processes and branch IFSC Codes easily accessible to its customers.
The adoption of chatbots and artificial intelligence by banks has been on a constant rise with many private sector banks already adopting it. SBI recently launched a chatbot Sia, that uses AI to address customer issues. Others such as Yes banks’s Yes Pay bot, Digi Bank’s KAI and ICICI bank’s software are some of the advancements of AI in banking.
From personalisation to customer-centric approach, predictive risk management to defining product optimisation across various channels; the banking sector has given rise to a new breed of talent across the data analytics space.
