DBS equips its customer service officers with gen AI-powered virtual assistant

Nurdianah Md Nur
2-min read

When fully deployed, the virtual assistant is expected to reduce call handling time by 20%.

By the end of this year, DBS Bank's 500 customer service officers in Singapore will be able to use a generative AI-powered virtual assistant to serve customers more efficiently.

Called “CSO Assistant”, the virtual assistant was fully developed by the bank’s artificial intelligence (AI) engineers, who integrated a large language model tailored to local languages and parlance with voice telephony and speech recognition capabilities.

CSO Assistant transcribes customer queries in real time and does ‘live’ searches on the bank’s knowledge base to quickly retrieve query-specific information. It also helps with post-call documentation by providing instant call summaries and pre-filling service request fields.

Pilots began in October 2023 and so far, CSO Assistant has demonstrated transcription and solutioning accuracy of nearly 100%. It is expected to reduce call handling time by up to 20% when fully deployed.

Besides Singapore, DBS is progressively rolling out CSO Assistant to its other markets over the next 12 months, starting with Taiwan and Hong Kong.

CSO Assistant is one of over 20 generative AI use cases which DBS is implementing, identified from a pool of over 240 ideas generated internally in 2023.

“We see generative 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 generative 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,” says Nimish Panchmatia, chief data and transformation officer of DBS.

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