SBI Mutual Fund Overcomes the Challenge of Serving 6M Customers Using Avaamo’s Chatbot

Keeping in mind the needs of the evolving customer, SBIMF decided to use chatbots as another communication channel for their 6 million investors since providing support through call centres and a dedicated team of representatives across India was becoming a challenge. The bank then opted for Avaamo, a deep-learning software company that specializes in conversational interfaces to solve specific problems in enterprises, as the service partner post an initial Proof of Concept.

“The biggest challenge we face is that conversationally it’s quite difficult to explain to customers the concepts and nuances of mutual funds because it is very technical explains Srinivas Jain, Executive Director and CMO of SBI Mutual Funds. “Our chatbots are bound by the rules and are programmed to obey the commands that have been entered into the software which means that they are more patient, use language that is easy to understand and will explain points as many times as a user wants it to. Users can also avail of a more personal touch from these bots since they retain all past conversations,” added Srinivas.

The bank was in talks with over fifteen vendors and finally chose Avaamo because “it is secure, scalable, trustworthy and definitely a new profit centre for any organization” as stated by Nitin Agarwal the Head of Digital Initiatives at SBI Mutual Funds. Srinivas Jain also went on to add, “Avaamo was recommended to us by some industry leaders who have worked with the company, we very impressed with what we saw as the use case and these use cases that they have done with different industries and especially the financial industry was very interesting”. 

SBIMF has partnered with Avaamo for two categories of users; firstly for their internal employees and secondly for the external investors and distributors. Ever since the SBI chatbots for its 6 million customers were made live, the productivity of agents have gone up as they are able to answer queries faster because the chatbots share their workload. SBI mutual has also benefited by the fact that Chatbots are a faster point of contact for the investors and they also have 24/7 connectivity instead of waiting for the call centre or branch to open in case of any queries or complaints.

Jain believes that a large part of their business will soon become digital and chatbots will be a crucial aspect of this digitization. Avaamo has also worked with SBI mutual fund on the automation of service level tools for its internal staff, which is a chatbot interface for the digitized manuals.

Avaamo is building fundamental AI technology across a broad area of neural networks, speech synthesis and deep learning to make conversational computing for the enterprise a reality. Avaamo’s conversational AI platform is currently deployed globally across a diverse set of large enterprise financial institutions, Telcos, Retailers and Mutual fund institutions.